


Outside the Lines

by the_original_n_chan



Category: Leverage
Genre: BIPOC Characters, Blood, Don't copy to another site, Established Relationship, Hardison Knows All the Tropes, Hospitals, Multi, Not Quite a Zombie Apocalypse, OT3, Post-Season/Series 05, Racism, Some gore and violence, Zombie Eliot Spencer, braaaaains, sketchy science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:27:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 78,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25435378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_original_n_chan/pseuds/the_original_n_chan
Summary: An investigation for a case takes an unexpected turn. Now the OT3 have to figure out who's responsible for a mysterious zombie virus, what their plan is, and how to stop it.And Eliot is one of the infected....
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer
Comments: 120
Kudos: 100





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, all! If you're reading this, I hope you like zombies (for some definition of "like," anyway). This fic is complete, and I'm aiming to post new chapters twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays.
> 
> Many thanks to darkwingdukat, who beta-read the whole damn thing despite not, in fact, liking zombies.

Today was shaping up to be the worst day of Alec’s likely-to-be-tragically-too-short life—and given Moreau’s pool, being buried alive, and that time he’d had to work with Chaos, it was a _very_ high bar to meet. If he’d known how things were going to pan out, he would’ve stayed in bed and come up with some creative way to keep Parker and Eliot in there with him. But how could he have known that the search for a missing lab assistant would lead them to a corporate biotech lab with a room full of mysteriously wiped servers and from there into a legitimate _zombie nightmare_ —well, okay, given his extensive knowledge of movies, maybe the idea should’ve occurred to him at some point along the line. That was definitely a failing on his part.

In any case, yes, there were zombies (“ _Those are goddamn zombies, Eliot!_ ” “ _I_ know _what a zombie looks like!_ ”), and there had been running, and he’d followed Parker, and Parker, being Parker, had gone _up_. So now the two of them were on a catwalk above a laboratory floor, and a pair of undead guys—the guards from outside that Eliot had taken down—were standing between them and escape.

“Eliot?” Alec called, trying to keep the quaver out of his voice. The comm had gone quiet a few minutes ago; the last thing coming through had been the familiar grunts of effort as Eliot did that thing that he did so well. The silence was nothing new; Eliot was probably in guerrilla stealth mode, stalking through the complex to find them, taking out undead along the way. Because Eliot was the kind of badass—smart _and_ lethal—that you wanted on your side in the zombie apocalypse, who would pile up a ludicrous body count and never once do something idiotic. There was no zombie that could take him out in one strike. They’d have heard the struggle for sure.

Meanwhile, there was the situation right in front of them to worry about. The two zombies were advancing, their movements awkward, loose-limbed, and uncoordinated, but not nearly slow enough for his liking. Could be worse, though—they could be lightning-quick rage-type zombies. Catching Parker’s arm, he tugged her back with him, eyes fixed on the threat. Put a little more distance between them, and then spin around and run.

Parker stiffened, then turned her head, and he didn’t know what exactly she’d sensed, but he risked a glance behind them. His heart seized at the sight of a shadowed figure looming in the doorway to the catwalk—and then every muscle went watery with relief as that figure took a step forward, and goddamn it, Eliot wasn’t tall enough that he should be able to loom like that, but somehow he always managed to, and it had to be his general air of menace that made up the difference. “Eliot!” Parker called, and Eliot moved toward them, step by step out of the gloom—

Oh. Shit. _Oh shitshitshitshit_....

Blood spray splattered Eliot’s face and chest. His movements were all wrong—not quite like the zombies they’d faced, but somehow not _right_. His expression was disturbingly blank, and as the dull light crept over his face at last, Alec saw the alien darkness of his eyes, pupils dilated so wide as to nearly eclipse the irises.

Parker caught her breath, a barely audible, high-pitched gasp, _didn’t_ scream, and whisper-called again, like maybe this was some con Eliot was pulling and she didn’t want to alert the zombies to it. “... _Eliot?_ ”

They were dead. They were dead people walking, just like the zombies, only difference was they hadn’t actually gotten infected yet. Eliot took another step, then another, faster now, more focused—broke pace and _charged_ at them, _holy shit_ , full-on sprint, there was the rage type right there. Somehow in the whiteout of terror Alec threw himself in front of Parker, arms spread like it would even do anything. Eliot slammed into his arm—and blew past him, the force of it spinning Alec around until the catwalk railing slammed into his stomach, crumpling him forward over it. He was still fighting to breathe when Parker hauled him upright again.

_Clang. Bang_. The steel grates shook underneath them. Eliot had hit the other...the _zombies_ with the power of a bomb, smashing one into a support strut, then spinning to bludgeon the other one off balance with a flurry of blows and kicks before grabbing an arm and twisting it— _crack_. He shoved that one down on its face, turned on the other, and they’d seen this dance before—Eliot taking on one opponent, then another, shifting back and forth between them, breaking the defenses of each one down piece by piece until he put them on the ground for good—but never like this, never so brutal and animalistic. Alec had known that Eliot kept his violence on a tight leash, had seen hints before of what he was capable of, but now it was off the chain.

Eliot flipped a limp zombie body over the railing, then whirled to beat the other one down, grabbed its head and twisted, one sharp jerk snapping its neck, before he pitched it off the catwalk as well. Reeling backward, he staggered to a stop, facing away from them.

“Eliot, are you okay?” Parker yelled. “Come on! We need to get out of here.”

“ _Go_ ,” Eliot growled without turning, fists clenched at his sides.

Parker shifted her weight as if to move toward him— _oh no, mama, no_ , and Alec plucked at her sleeve in warning. But even with his heart breaking, he couldn’t help reaching for hope. Zombies usually didn’t talk—in fiction, anyway—so if Eliot was still speaking, maybe he wasn’t too far gone. Maybe he was strong enough to hold out until they could save him. “Eliot, man...,” he pleaded, not even quite sure what he was asking for.

“ _Get out!_ ” Eliot’s shout, raw and ragged-edged, rang off the echoing steel around them. His back was taut, muscles across his shoulders straining with tension. Parker started forward, and Alec grabbed for her arm—she brushed his hand aside, striding faster, and before he could collect himself, she was already inside Eliot’s reach. Eliot’s stance softened; slowly he turned until his gaze met hers. Raising his hands, he rested them on her shoulders as she stared into his face—his grip clenched tight, he jerked her closer, going for her throat, and Alec launched himself toward them just as Parker jammed her taser into the side of Eliot’s neck and fired. Eliot spasmed long and violently, then went down as soon as she cut the current. He lay motionless except for a residual twitch or two, and Parker immediately flipped him over, pulled out some cuffs from wherever she kept all her little tricks and surprises, and started securing his arms behind him.

“At least we know the taser works,” she muttered with dark humor as Alec staggered to a stop, clutching at his chest in a gesture that was only partly for the sake of melodrama.

“Woman, don’t _do_ things like that! Haven’t I shown you enough horror movies that you know all the clichés yet? We’re gonna have a refresher course when we get home. I’m ’a sit you down with TvTropes.”

“Sounds great.” Parker finished and stood up, dusting off her hands. The taser had already disappeared. “You get his shoulders.”

“ ’Course I get the bitey end,” Alec grumbled under his breath as he eased around the prone form of hopefully-not-quite-a-hundred-percent-zombie Eliot and looked for a reasonably safe grip.

Seriously, though, better him than Parker. Because no matter how starkly terrified he was, he wasn’t _ever_ going to let her get that close again.

By some miracle they made it back to Lucille without running into any more zombies. Parker hit Eliot with the taser a couple more times on the way, whenever it looked like he might be starting to stir (“ _Sorry, just a precaution._ ”) They sealed up their exit as best they could, added several sets of industrial strength zip ties around Eliot’s arms and legs before shoving him in the van, because he was goddamn _Eliot Spencer_ and literally capable of taking out a hit squad with both arms tied behind his back, and then they lit out of there, out of the parking lot and onto one of the maze of roads winding through the research park—at Alec-speed, not Parker’s, because emergency or not this van was still his baby. When he finally glanced up into the rearview mirror, he saw Parker crouching in the back, wearing blue disposable gloves and using wet wipes to clean the blood from a still-unconscious Eliot’s face and hair.

“Parker. _Parker_. Get back from him.”

“We don’t want zombie blood in the van.” Well...couldn’t say his girl wasn’t practical. Nervously he flicked his gaze to the road and back up a couple of times until she finally dropped the last wipe into a ziplock bag, followed by the gloves, and sealed it. “Where do we put this?”

“Red biohazard container, back bottom cabinet, on the right.” Lucille 3.5—same Lucille, only upgraded—was _very_ well equipped, if he did say so himself, and you never knew when you might have to use a syringe on somebody, or pick pieces of glass out of some fool’s hand, _Eliot_.

Speaking of the man, there was a rustle and a long, low groan, and Alec immediately pulled over so he could turn around in his seat. Eliot’s face twitched, and his eyes slowly opened. His chest rose and fell in a single slow breath.

(Breathing. Eliot was _breathing_. He wasn’t dead. Undead. Whatever. And several gallons of tension drained out of Alec, leaving him weak and shaky.)

Beaming, Parker bent toward Eliot, and Alec was just gathering himself for a squawk of warning as she murmured, “Hey, it’s okay. We’re safe—”

—and _of course_ Eliot lunged like a snake and snapped at her, snarling, because that was the kind of story they were in, and anyone else might have been righteously fucked, but Parker’s flicker-fast hands were already nowhere near him. As he rolled toward her, she sprang back, then leaped over him—got a foot underneath him before he could twist back around and kicked him over onto his front. Dropping, she planted one knee between his shoulder blades and clenched her hand in his hair, pressing his face to the floor. “Eliot, stop!”

Growling hoarsely, he writhed, trying to throw her off, but with all his limbs wrapped up in ties, he couldn’t get enough purchase. He subsided finally, going still.

“Okay. Good. Okay.” Parker’s slight breathlessness betrayed her nerves. “We’ve got you. You’re going to be all right.” With another guttural noise, Eliot bucked his hips and tried to wrench his head out of her grip; her fist tightened and he stopped again, though his body remained tensed. “We’re going to _fix_ this! That’s what we do. We fix things. We make things _right_.” Her voice had gotten louder and also more quavery; her eyes glimmered wet, but she smiled, even though it trembled—smiled for the man who couldn’t even see her face, who would maybe never again know who she was. “You’re here with us, Eliot, in Lucille. And we’re going to take care of you, just like you’ve always taken care of us. Okay? We’re going to _help_ you. So please,” the words went splintery, cracking, “just...stop.”

Was he imagining it, or was Eliot’s body relaxing a little? Could zombies do a fake out? Or was something actually happening? He didn’t dare put a word in, because right now it was all Parker, laying her heart open like she did for very few people in the entire world. Her hand eased up in Eliot’s hair, and she ran her fingers through it, slowly petting. Eliot never moved.

“That’s it,” she whispered, leaning closer. “Good. Good boy. We love you. And I know that you love us, too. You’d never want to hurt us.”

“...par...ker...”

Barely more than breaths, each one forced out with a groan, and Alec had to cover his mouth with one hand because he had too many feelings to keep contained in his body otherwise.

“...hhhahr...”

The word choked off, but Alec knew it, knew for sure that Eliot was trying to say his name. Parker’s smile practically lit up the van as she sat back a little.

“...k-kill...me...”

What.

_No._

“ _No!_ ” Parker shouted, her face gone even paler than usual. “Have you even been _listening_ to me? _We are not going to kill you!_ ”

“...c-nngh...can’t...gonna...’m gonna... _hurt_ you...”

“Hardison, _tell_ him,” Parker begged, as if his words were magic, and in her eyes they probably were, but he wasn’t feeling any confidence in their power just then. Swallowing hard, he stared down at Eliot, his friend, his lover, and so much more—a third of his whole heart lying there on the floor of his van, halfway down the road to dead—and then cleared his throat roughly.

“Eliot. Babe. I’m gonna ask, and I want you to give me the God’s honest truth. Okay?” His eyes burned, but those tears were just going to have to wait, because he needed to talk right now. “Are you suffering in there? Would us holding onto you be a misery? Because if what you really, truly want is to be free of this, I...I can do that. For you.”

“ _Hardison!_ ”

“I’ll pull that trigger myself,” he assured Eliot, despite the icy clench in his gut that agreed with Parker’s shock and outrage. He prayed that he’d actually be able to do it when the time came. If. _If._ “But if you’re just saying that ’cause you’re trying to protect us, then _hell_ no. Parker’s right. We have each other’s backs, now and always. _We don’t walk away from each other._ So believe me when I say that we will stay with you till the end of forever, and we will _fight_ this thing, and if I have to take apart every virus in the goddamn world and put it back together again my own self, I _will_ find a cure for you. So don’t you give up, man.” He caught his breath finally. His hands were shaking. “Don’t you give up.”

Silence for achingly long moments, until he wondered if Eliot had gone beyond being able to talk, if they’d missed some last words because he couldn’t just shut his damn mouth. Then, a sound—an exhalation, something that could’ve been a moan or a sigh.

When the words came, Alec thought he might faint with sheer relief.

“When y’sleep... _chain_ me. Always have...a weapon. ’N’ if...if I can’t...’f I’m gone... _end me_.”

“I swear,” Alec said, with the utmost solemnity. “My hand to God, may I never touch another computer again in my whole life.” And maybe some people would think that oath was weak, but Eliot knew him, knew how it would make him just a shadow, practically as good as undead himself.

“I promise,” Parker whispered, her voice thin and soft. Slowly Eliot turned his head, and she let him, her hand shifting to brush his hair back from his face as he looked sidelong up at her. She touched the backs of her fingers to his cheek, resting them there—he closed his eyes, and his nostrils flared slightly, but he made no move.

“We’re good,” Alec breathed, half to himself, too awestruck for silence but not wanting to break the moment. “Hell yeah.”

“We’re good,” Parker echoed, smiling. Sitting back, she reached for a pair of clippers. “I’m going to cut you loose,” she told Eliot, adding for reassurance, “I’m armed.”

_Snip. Snip. Snip._ The thick plastic strips parted, one by one. Parker unfastened the handcuffs, and Eliot’s arms were free. Pressing his palms to the floor, he slowly pushed himself up and rolled over until he was sitting. He kept his head down, not meeting their eyes. Carefully Parker cut through the ties around his legs, moving with the same precise focus that she’d use dancing with lasers, because taser or no taser her hands were occupied just then, and she was easily within Eliot’s reach. He sat like a statue until the last tie came off, then just flexed his knees slightly, unstraightening his legs. Nothing terrifying happened, and Parker rocked back on her heels with a satisfied smirk as the general tension inside the van slipped down a good several notches.

“Okay, let’s move!” she announced, and as Alec turned back to the wheel, she added to Eliot, “Take off your shirt.”

What—oh. The blood. Good thing they all kept several changes in the van, both regular clothes and outfits for impromptu cons. His storage system was indeed a thing of beauty. He pulled out onto the road, keeping an ear on the quiet sounds of undressing and redressing behind him as he drove.

What was that _other_ sound, though?

“You hear that?” he asked. The faint chatter was getting louder...nearer? Nearer for sure. And he was really hoping that it wasn’t what he thought it was, but—

“Chopper,” Eliot rasped, confirming that it was indeed the thumping of rotors. Damn it. He exchanged a glance with Parker in the rearview mirror.

“Is that for us?” she wondered tensely.

“Gonna find out.” He drove along the curving road, past blocky corporate labs and headquarters sitting back among immaculately landscaped lawns, just like they were three perfectly innocent people in a perfectly innocent van that was not filled with items of dubious legality as well as a crew of thieves, one of them zombie infected, and the copter grumbled overhead and away. “Whew.”

Parker slid into the passenger seat and frowned. “How many exits are there?”

“To the research park?” He poked at the GPS. “Two aside from the one we’re heading for. Why?” She nodded at the road ahead, and way down at the end he spotted all-too-familiar red and blue lights whirling. “Aw, hell.”

“Roadblock,” Parker muttered. “Someone got out.” Out of the lab, she meant, someone other than them, which was good in that maybe an alarm had been raised and any escaped zombies weren’t going to be wandering around the neighborhood unchecked, but bad in that they were about to get caught up in it.

“What do we do?” he asked, slowing down a little.

“Run ’n’ they’ll chase,” Eliot said, and Parker nodded.

“We go through. Nice and calm and normal.” She pulled Alec’s shades out from behind the sun visor and tossed them into the back, and he winced—those were designer glasses, dammit.

“Not the virus-smuggling mad scientists you’re looking for. Got it.” He blew out a breath, his nervy anxiety shifting toward the welcome adrenaline of a con about to happen. “You good, man?”

“ ’M fine.” If Eliot had still been ragey and tied up, they would’ve had a problem, but it seemed like he was with them, at least enough that they had a good shot at this. By the time they’d reached the cop cars parked across the road, Alec had gotten into his character headspace; wearing an expression of puzzled annoyance, he rolled down his window as a young police officer came over.

“Sir, I’m going to need you to pull in here.” The kid swept his arm toward the parking lot of one of the buildings, and Alec scowled.

“Why? What’s goin’ on?” _Why am I, a Black man driving an expensive van, being pulled over by the police for no discernable reason I can see?_

“There’s been an incident in the area,” the officer said, like he’d been rehearsing it. “We just want to ask you some questions.”

“Oh yeah, an _incident_ , like that ain’t vague or nothing,” Alec sneered, because somebody trying to sneak through a roadblock would definitely not be drawing attention to themselves by being an obnoxious asshole. “What kinda ‘incident’ we talkin’ ’bout here? Kidnappin’? Murderin’? Pharmaceutical CEOs havin’ a gang war over they’s drugs?”

The officer didn’t quite sigh, but his resigned look said he had things he’d far rather be doing than trying to talk down a belligerent citizen. “Sir, just pull in. It won’t take long, and then you can go.”

“Fine. Great. Whatever.” Rolling his eyes, Alec turned into the lot. This being the weekend, it was mostly empty of cars, except for a few other drivers who apparently had come up against the roadblock too, but there were plenty of other vehicles: ambulances, a couple of police vans, and what looked like an emergency headquarters trailer, which had gotten set up in a hurry if that was what it actually was. There were men and women in windbreakers walking around with purpose, a scattering of law enforcement, a couple of people in white coats who seemed likely to be medical personnel. “Whoa,” he muttered to Parker. “They’re taking this _real_ serious.”

Another police officer waved him to a stop, then came around to his window. “I’ll need to see your IDs,” the man said. Grumbling and muttering under his breath, Alec stole a quick glance at his driver’s license as he was handing it over, to see which identity belonged to the wallet that Parker had just slipped into his pocket, and then checked out and passed along Parker’s. “Is that everyone in the car?” The officer craned his neck, trying to see past the front seats into the darker back of the van.

“Hey,” Eliot said, gripping Alec’s shoulder as he leaned into the gap between the seats. “ ’S up?” He sounded hoarse and maybe a little like he was stoned, but near enough to normal. Alec’s pulse was jumping, and he told himself it was because he was thrilled that Eliot was clear headed enough to be playing the game along with them, and not because he’d felt Eliot’s breath on the back of his neck, which meant Eliot’s teeth were way the hell too close for comfort.

“ID,” Parker said. Reaching into the back, she produced another palmed card for the policeman, who scanned it and the other two into a tablet before returning them.

“I’ll need you to answer some questions,” the officer said.

“Ain’t you s’pposed to, to read me my rights or somethin’ first?” Alec challenged.

When the officer replied, his words were clipped, already sounding exasperated. He was clearly a lot less patient then the first one, or maybe he was just having a worse day. “You’re not being taken into custody. We’re investigating a potential infectious disease outbreak in the area, and we need to gather information about anything you might have seen or heard.”

“A disease? _A disease?_ I’m ’a roll up my window.” He went for the switch, and the officer put his hand on top of the window slot, which would do exactly nothing if Alec actually did try to close the window, but points for making the gesture.

“ _Look._ The Public Health Department has issued an emergency order. I can stand here and read the whole thing out loud to you if you want, but the gist of it is, if you don’t cooperate, you can be detained. And the quicker you cooperate, the sooner you can go. You got that?”

Alec threw his hands up in exaggerated surrender. “Fine. Go ’head—ask me yo questions.”

They went through what had to be some kind of checklist: Where were you coming from? Where are you going? Have you approached or entered any of the buildings? (You couldn’t exactly enter a building without approaching it first, but Alec decided that he’d already been enough of a pain in the ass without quibbling over logic.) Did you see any people walking around? Anything at all unusual? Alec did all the answering, with Parker occasionally nodding or shaking her head in agreement. Eliot remained quiet.

“All right,” the officer said at last. “Get out of the car.”

“ _What?_ Aw, c’mon, man.”

The officer pulled the door open. “Out. All of you.” Alec huffed and exited. “Go to that tent,” the man said, pointing to an open-sided white tent where a couple of other drivers were interacting with some lab-coated doctor/scientist types. “They’re going to be taking a blood sample.”

Alec’s heart sank, but he kept up his act. “They can do that? That part of your emergency order too? _Damn_ , man, this is a vi-o-lation of my rights as a citizen. I’m ’a contact my political representatives about this.” He jabbed a finger in the officer’s direction as he backed away. “Due process, man. Due process!” Parker and Eliot came around the front of the van—Alec met Parker’s eyes, then flicked his gaze toward the tent and back, and she lowered her lashes at him in a half blink, a silent direction: _We go with it._

Okay, then. “Let’s get this thing over with,” he said. They walked toward the tent, approaching it just as the two men ahead of them were leaving. It was the three of them, the medical folks, and the lab computer equipment set up on a folding table, and at the sight of that Alec had a plan. _Stall_ , he mouthed at Parker, and she nodded.

As she began an increasingly hysterical show of being terrified of needles, he pulled out his phone and set to work. The CDC’s system was nowhere near the equal of certain other government bodies of his acquaintance, but since it wasn’t connected to any of his primary interests, he didn’t have a back door already set up, and it would be a challenge to crack it in just a few minutes with nothing more than his phone. Luckily, he didn’t need to—all he needed was to tap into the equipment’s satellite uplink and be connected on the local level. After a couple of rounds of Parker gathering up her courage and then retreating with a wail of fright, he was ready to go. He stepped forward to where she was clinging to Eliot and whimpering pathetically.

“Look, it’s not that bad, a’ight? Let’s just get it over with so we can get out of here.” He pushed up his sleeve and allowed a relieved phlebotomist to demonstrate drawing blood on him. “There, see—just a tiny little prick, takes five seconds. Go on, be brave, girl. You can do it.” As Parker sniffled and then stepped forward, trembling, he leaned into Eliot, resting one hand on his shoulder. “Hope you got some blood left in you,” he muttered. Eliot tilted his head toward him, but otherwise remained motionless and silent. _Just hang in there_ , Alec willed. _Don’t go all zombie freakout on us, and we’ll be home free._

He stayed close as Eliot took his turn—not that he knew what he’d actually do if there was a problem, but he hoped that his nearness would be enough to keep Eliot mentally all there. The phlebotomist had a little trouble finding a vein, and the blood that came out looked dark to Alec’s eyes, but at least there _was_ blood. The woman’s face was mostly hidden by her protective equipment, but he could see her small frown as she shook the sample, then handed it off to the man sitting at the equipment. He popped the vial into a slot.

_Now._ Eliot’s data slid straight into Alec’s phone, and the computer instead spit up the information that he’d cloned from another white male sample, sending it out to the screen and up into the CDC’s database. Lights went green, and the technician removed the vial, labeled it, and placed it in a case.

“Okay, we done now? We got places to be today.” The technician nodded, dismissing them—what, no _thank you, sorry for the inconvenience_? how rude—and Alec turned away. They’d just made it three steps outside of the tent and Alec was congratulating himself on their escape when he collided with Eliot, who’d stopped short and was standing there like he was frozen. “Hey, man, what’s up? We gotta...go....”

_...oh no._

A family had just disembarked from their minivan and was approaching the tent: a man, a woman carrying a toddler, and two slightly older children who were chasing each other in circles around the grownups. Eliot stood stiff and still, but his head was turning slowly, tracking them as the kids’ shrieks of excitement split the air.

“Eliot. _Eliot._ ” A low rumble crawled up out of Eliot’s chest, a barely audible _hhnnn_ that was more growl than moan but close enough to the latter that it was about to give Alec an anxiety attack, especially since there was no sign that Eliot was actually responding to him and not to...prey. Oh god.

“Eliot!” he snapped, trying to make up in sharpness what he couldn’t do with volume. He got himself in between Eliot and the family, right up in Eliot’s face. “Look at me, man. Just at me.” Eliot twitched ever so slightly, a break in that locked-on focus, and little as it was, he’d take it, build on it, make this work. “C’mon, El, don’t do this, we’re almost out.” Eliot started, a bigger jolt this time. He rocked back a step, and Alec went with him, staying inside his personal zone, even grabbing hold of his shoulder before really thinking about what he was doing. “That’s it,” he murmured, trying his best to catch Eliot’s gaze through the sunglasses. “We just walk away. You can do it.”

And his legs almost gave way with relief when Eliot visibly shook off whatever urge had come over him. Eliot looked down, away from everyone, swallowing hard, then back up at Parker, who had taken hold of his hand. “You’re okay,” she said, smiling that crinkle-eyed smile that Alec loved. “ _We’re_ okay.” She flashed them a glimpse of the vial of blood she’d stolen, then made it disappear again and tugged at Eliot’s hand. “Now let’s get out of here.”

As she drew Eliot with her, he glanced back at the family; he licked his lips, and Alec’s blood chilled. But Eliot walked away with Parker without any hesitation, striding firmly (and quickly, but not so much that anyone would notice) toward their van. And Alec could only hope that the lip-licking had been some kind of subconscious slip. Surely it wasn’t really anything to worry about.

Right?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Buckle up; this chapter's a long one. ^_^ )

Sitting back from the screen, Alec rubbed at his eyes. Still so much to do, but he’d been going for a few hours and could use a break. Besides, he kept thinking about that bolted door to the second bedroom. There’d really been no need for Eliot to insist that they lock him down while Alec worked and Parker went shopping (or, this being Parker, “shopping”). He could’ve kept an eye on Eliot just fine by himself—there _was_ such a thing as multitasking.

Or....

Well....

All right, he didn’t want to admit it, but to be honest, it could’ve been a problem. If he’d gotten too immersed in what he was doing, say, and didn’t notice a creepy, zombified Eliot looming up in the shadows behind him, because that was definitely a classic horror scenario. But he hated that they had to think like that. It felt unnatural and just plain _wrong_ —it went against all the bone-deep trust that they had in Eliot, to act like he was no longer their protector and instead was something— _someone_ —that they’d need protecting from.

But anyway, whatever—since he was taking five, he could let Eliot out for a while, see how he was doing, and maybe (hopefully) mock him a little for his paranoia. Stretching and rising, Alec ambled down the hallway and knocked on the bedroom door. “Yo, Eliot,” he called. “Wakey, wakey!” There was no cranky response from inside—or any response, actually. Could Mr. Only-Sleeps-for-Ninety-Minutes-a-Night actually be...sleeping? (Although that claim was a lie, Alec had found, at least some of the time, and he had the adorable video proof of Eliot lying face down in their bed, snoring quietly into the pillow.)

He knocked again. “Eliot? Bro, you in there?” Still just silence, and his skin was starting to crawl. Why hadn’t he been smart enough to set up a camera inside the room? Now he was going to have to actually open the door to see what was going on in there. Carefully he shot the top bolt, and then the bottom one (because Home Depot might not carry manacles, but they did at least have door hardware, so Alec had made a stop there on the way home). When he pressed his ear against the door, he didn’t hear any shuffling or moaning. But still. “Perfect time for a jump scare,” he muttered, then cracked the door open a few inches and peered in.

Eliot was standing on the far side of the room, well away from the door. Relieved, Alec relaxed and straightened up, pushing the door a bit farther open, but before any words had a chance to exit his mouth a sense of wrongness started niggling at him. Eliot was too still. He hadn’t so much as glanced at Alec, which was totally out of character; instead he was staring at the window like he’d be looking at the view if the blinds weren’t closed in front of his face. Wetting his lips, Alec tried to swallow down his rising dread. “Eliot?”

Eliot turned his head, _way_ too slow to be okay. Though he was looking straight at Alec, it was like the sight didn’t really register—there was _seeing_ but no acknowledgment. In the low lamp light, Eliot’s eyes were like voids, blacker than black, unblinking.

Swaying, he took a step forward.

“Eliot. El—hey, man, don’t.” Step. And another step. How many steps did he have before the tension snapped and Eliot charged him in a sudden, lethal rush—how much time would he have to slam and lock the door? “C’mon, not this again, we’ve been through this, you know me!” No response, no reaction, just Eliot relentlessly approaching, killer’s hands and impassive, mindless stare, and Alec’s heart rate was thundering along so fast he could hardly breathe. He was starting to feel lightheaded—fucking wrong time for a panic attack—and _god damn it shut the door shut the door shut the door—_

“ _No_ ,” he begged Eliot, or maybe the universe, shaking his head like he could refuse this thing that was happening to them, his voice breaking on the words, “no, no, _no_.” And that was it, he was out of time, he had to do something, pick which way to jump, and he made his choice without even thinking about it, held his ground in the doorway for one last try—“ _Eliot!_ _Stop! ELIOT!_ ”

And Eliot stopped.

His knees weak, Alec clung to the door frame, scarcely daring to believe, because it still wasn’t too late for that jump scare. Eliot rocked back onto his heels, blinking for the first time, his face showing vague surprise—shock—then a flash of _I did that_ desolation, as much horror as Eliot ever showed, having gone beyond normal levels of horror years before they’d ever met him. He hunched his shoulders, his eyes screwing shut as he ground the heels of his hands into his temples like he could crush out the impulse that had been driving him. His ragged breathing sounded like a snarl.

But he was back.

“Oh my god. Oh my god. Nnnngh— _damn!_ ” Alec slumped against the wall, half laughing, every nerve singing as the après-stress survival hysteria kicked in. He was running so high he might not sleep for the next three days. “Man, you just about gave me a heart attack there. Whoo!”

“Damnit, Hardison,” Eliot spat, barely above a whisper, and never had that familiar curse been so blessedly welcome. “You know you’re an idiot?”

“You wound me,” Alec replied, all sorrowful betrayal, because he had totally been an idiot, and he was never going to let Eliot know they were in agreement on that. “I’ll have you know I was in _full_ control of the situation at all times. Figured I still had at least three-quarters of a second left to shut the door before you went all Romero on me. And look, everything turned out fine.” He spread his arms, grinning. “Power of love, man. It’s stronger than any zombie virus.”

Scowling in annoyance or confusion, or possibly both, Eliot shook his head, lowering his hands. “What—why—where’s Parker? Is she back?”

“Not yet, but she should be here soon. I just figured...it’s been a few hours, maybe you’d want a change of scenery. Something other than these four walls to look at.” It was a good-sized bedroom, not cramped at all, but it was still essentially a box, and Alec was starting to wonder if sticking Eliot somewhere off by himself had been such a good idea. He’d seemed relatively okay in the car, when they’d all three been together, Alec and Parker talking and Eliot mostly listening, occasionally pitching in, and again now that he and Alec were interacting like normal. Keep the mind engaged; keep the man present with them. It was definitely something to look into.

Maybe Eliot was figuring similarly, because he glanced around like he’d just realized where he was, then hitched a shoulder in a half shrug and started for the door—slowly, giving Alec time to get clear, and to make a point Alec shifted just enough to not be blocking the way, but not enough to be _avoiding_.

As Eliot brushed by, not meeting his eyes, Alec took the moment to get a good look at him. He didn’t look...dead? More dead? Although technically, whatever Eliot was, he _wasn’t_ dead—his heart beat, though frighteningly slow, and his lungs drew breath, if not as much as Alec thought they should. (It was something he was going to check into for sure, as soon as Parker got back with the stuff he’d asked her to pick up.) He was very pale, and there were the pupils, inhumanly dilated and honestly kind of disturbing, but otherwise he could be taken for regular everyday Eliot.

Back out in the living room, Alec headed over to his computer. He should check on his ’net-crawling bots, see what they were finding and whether he needed to tweak their search parameters, see what kinds of patterns were emerging so far, and then he really had to get back to studying, because he was only trying to cram a med-school’s worth of virology and neuroscience at the same time as he was building up a base of primary care knowledge, and nobody really _got_ just how much brain work went into his job—

—and as he was bending over his laptop, a harsh voice snapped, right in his goddamn _ear_ , “ _Where’s your weapon, Hardison?_ ”

He launched himself away from the desk with a (manly) yelp, grabbed the nearest approximately weapon-sized and shaped object and spun around, only to realize that he was holding an empty soda bottle by the neck and brandishing it at Eliot. Eliot glared at him, face twisted up into an Eliot-typical expression of outrage and disbelief, saying, as plain as words, _I cannot_ believe _this guy_.

“Really?” Eliot growled. “ _Really?_ ”

“Oh, like you couldn’t kill someone with this.” Alec waved the bottle for emphasis.

“ _I_ could, but that’s not the point. Where the hell’s your taser?” Alec looked around at his computer nest. There it was, off to the side, where there wasn’t even the remotest chance that he would twiddle with it while he was deep in thought and accidentally zap something important.

“Are you _kidding_ me? For cryin’ out loud, man, you _have_ to start taking this seriously! I mean it! This is no time to be fucking around. I could—” Eliot abruptly cut off his rant and stomped away up the stairs to the loft before Alec could protest, leaving him gesturing futilely at empty air. Of course he was taking this whole thing seriously, damn it. It was deadly serious—literally. But something deep inside of him just didn’t want to accept that Eliot could turn on him. Like, if he didn’t look at it, didn’t take it in, it wouldn’t be reality.

Stupid. He was too damn smart to be so stupid.

Sinking into his chair, he rubbed at his face, then moved the taser into easier reach before beginning to type. He heard Eliot rummaging around somewhere up there, and he made sure to obviously note when Eliot returned, to keep his attention on Eliot’s movements, at least as much as he could while splitting his focus, because he had actual work to do. (Though he’d been going to take a break, he belatedly remembered, but he’d just finish this one bit first, now that he was into it.) So no, he wasn’t surprised when Eliot approached him. But he _did_ jump like a bunny when Eliot slammed a three-plus-foot length of wood down on the desk next to him. “What the hell is this?” he snapped, trying to cover just how startled he actually was.

“It’s a baseball bat,” Eliot said, with an air of _dumbass_ , and Alec bristled.

“I know that! _Why_ do you have a baseball bat?

“What, a man can’t have _one_ memento from a job—”

“No, that’s not—why do you have a bat right _here_ , right _now_?”

“Because the next time I come at you,” Eliot said, low and suddenly intense, leaning forward into his face, “I want you to be prepared to hit me with this.”

Alec gaped at him, flat-out horrified. “I ain’t hitting you with no bat!”

“Yes! Yes, you are.” Straightening, Eliot pointed to his temple. “In the _head_ , Hardison.”

“Oh no, no _way_ am I—”

“—Twice! Double tap me!”

“Oh, and who are you supposed to be now, Woody Harrelson—”

“First of all, his character wasn’t the one who said that, and second—”

“Hi, guys! What’s up?” They both turned at the same time to find Parker gazing curiously at them, and _damn_ was he glad to see her.

“Hey, babe, welcome back.” Smiling, he got up and went around the desk to meet her, pointedly turning his back on Eliot. “Did you find everything?” It looked like it, considering the amount of stuff she was carrying.

“Yep,” she confirmed, and started reciting the list. “One set of full restraints.” She shrugged a collection of straps and chains off one shoulder; it fell to the floor with a rattling clank. “Pulse oximeter, stethoscope, blood pressure meter—” each one followed by a medical case or bag being set down, “—why did you want _three_ different kinds of thermometer?”

“They all take readings in different ways, from different places.” He heard Eliot draw in a breath and turned to wave a finger at him. “Nah, nuh uh, I was _not_ thinking about there, so you can just relax.” Eliot rumbled warningly but subsided. Not like he’d never had anything up his ass before, but Alec allowed that the mood was probably not real conducive right now.

“And last—” Parker held a plastic bag out to him, her arm extended stiffly and her face scrunched up in distaste, “—the brain.”

“The _what_ —”

Ignoring Eliot’s outburst, Alec took the bag from her and peered into it. There was a, a _tupperware_ container, for god’s sake, and inside...yep, that was a brain, all right, all wrinkly and slimy and about a hundred times grosser in person than on TV. Grimacing, he drew back. “Oh, ew, that’s just nasty—I mean, delicious! Mmm mmm.” He glanced at Eliot, who not only didn’t seem convinced, he looked downright appalled.

“Where the hell did you get a _brain_?”

“Did you know that there’s a for-profit body donation company right here in Portland? Because I did _not_ know that until today. And I kinda wish I still didn’t know.” Alec shook his head. “That is some seriously shady business going on, y’all.”

“It was creepy.” Parker twitched, a full-body shudder, her eyes wide and staring at some terrible memory. “There were all these heads in buckets in a big refrigerator.”

“And that is definitely something we should investigate further— _after_ we take care of the current situation. Speaking of which,” he turned to offer the bag to Eliot, “bon appétit, mon ami.”

Eliot looked from the bag to Alec’s face and back like he was only just fitting that piece into the puzzle—which, c’mon, seriously? Zombies and brains went together like...like...okay, his analogies were failing him. Or maybe Eliot was just fighting hard to cling onto his denial.

“Oh _hell_ no!” Eliot erupted at last. “You think I—that I—forget it! Just forget it!”

“You sure, man? You’re not feeling just, like, a little bit hungry?” Alec shook the bag enticingly. “Braaaains.”

“What the fuck’s wrong with you? I ain’t eatin’ someone’s _brain_!” Eliot actually retreated, backing across the room, and Alec had enough sympathy (and self-preservation) not to chase him. Sighing, he turned toward the kitchen.

“Okay, well, if you get the urge to nosh on our craniums at some point, this’ll be right here, in the fridge.” And he was not going to think too hard about that plastic bag sitting there next to his sodas. Shutting the refrigerator door, he went back over to the collection of medical supplies and started opening things up. He had some fancier equipment being shipped, but it wouldn’t arrive until the next day; this would at least give them a start. “Now come on over here and sit down. I want to get some readings on you.”

“Later,” Eliot grunted, staying put right where he was, and Alec fixed him with a first-degree Nana look.

“No, _now_. We need to have a baseline in case anything changes. Ideally we would’ve done this as soon as possible after the fact, but....” But it hadn’t occurred to him until after they’d gotten home and he’d dragged his jangled thoughts into order. Otherwise they could’ve broken into an urgent-care center or something on the way. He needed to do better than that.

“Water under the bridge,” he murmured. Setting aside the guilt, he focused on the oral thermometer’s packaging, which was determined to defy him. Why in this enlightened twenty-first century were plastic blister-packs still a thing that existed? “What’d really help is if we had your pre-zombification vitals. You never get an annual checkup? Our insurance covers that, you know.”

“I hate goin’ to the doctor.” Eliot’s expression was trying to imply that some of that hate was being transferred to Alec, but after all these years he knew better.

“Uh huh,” he said blandly. “So I’ve heard. Many a time. Now sit your ass down on that couch,” he pointed, “and let me get my data off you.”

He’d been ninety-something percent certain that Eliot would give in, and if he’d bet on it, he’d’ve won. Eliot stomped across the room, flung himself down on the couch, and flipped his hair out of his face. Stretching his arms out along the seat back in order to take up maximum space (and attempt to present maximum intimidation, which, nice try), he glowered at Alec.

“Ooh, I wanna do it!” The thermometer, which he’d only _just_ gotten open, vanished out of his hand as Parker bounced past him. Bending toward Eliot with a manic grin, she sketched little circles in the air with it, like she was attempting to coax a spoon into a reluctant child’s mouth. “Open wiiiide!”

“ _Mnph._ ” Eliot made a couple of grabs at the thermometer, with Parker merrily snatching it out of reach each time. “Didn’t you get to play doctor as a kid?” he snarled. She went to zip in past his defense, and he swiped at her again—close, but fail.

“Come on, be a _good_ boy,” Parker crooned, and Alec couldn’t help but smirk. Eliot was weak against the _good boy._ Sure enough, after one last token effort, he surrendered with bad grace, scowling up at Parker as he allowed her to slip the thermometer under his tongue. He crossed his arms, looking as defiant as a man in his position could (in other words, an awful lot like a sulky kid), and Parker straightened with a satisfied nod.

“We need lollipops,” she announced.

“Sorry, don’t got no lollipops,” Alec said, working on the next package. “We got gummi frogs, though.” Eliot growled around the thermometer, his glare promising slow death if they even tried to feed him a gummi, and it was nice, for these few moments, to pretend that everything was normal, and that Eliot wasn’t infected by a virus that could take him away from them and never, ever let them steal him back.

* * *

Over the years, lots of people had said of her—and sometimes told her to her face—that she didn’t know right from wrong. That wasn’t true at all. She understood “wrong” perfectly well; she just didn’t feel that the word applied to most of the things other people used it for. If she planned and executed a heist and carried it through perfectly, then the result was absolutely right. (Not legal, sure, but legal was different.) If they’d wanted to keep her out, then they should have had better security. If they wanted their stuff returned, then they should track it down and steal it back. Nate had understood that even before he became a thief. It was simple, reasonable—it was how the world worked.

 _This_ was wrong. This was all wrong. And it was getting _worse_.

She huddled in Hardison’s desk chair, legs drawn up and arms tight around her knees as she watched Eliot pacing. He wasn’t walking right. Even when he was relaxed, there was always a gathered energy to him. A focus. He didn’t just...meander around. But now his steps were uncollected, out of rhythm; his arms were too loose and didn’t swing the way they should. His eyes tracked his surroundings but didn’t sweep the area properly, catching all the details. She wondered if he’d even notice if she moved.

He’d seemed okay when she’d gotten back from running Hardison’s errands. Just their regular grumpy Eliot. And she’d thought that maybe this whole zombie deal wouldn’t be so bad. (Aside from the brain thing, and Hardison was going to owe her big time for that.) But Hardison had been anxious and trying to hide it, and after all the testing was done and Eliot had escaped from the room, he’d told her what had happened when he’d opened the bedroom door to let Eliot out.

So she’d watched carefully. And hour by hour through the night, she’d watched Eliot slipping.

It was subtle at first. Just a little less intensity in his eyes. A little less expression on his face. She’d thought she could be imagining it. He watched some TV, but when Hardison asked him about the game that was on, he hadn’t really been paying attention. Then he started wandering around the apartment as though he was restless but at the same time apathetic. He picked up some of Hardison’s opened boxes and broke them down for recycling, but ignored or missed the little pieces of plastic and cardboard scattered on the floor. He’d gone into the kitchen a couple of times and moved things around as if he’d been about to cook, but then came out again without having actually made anything, except once a sandwich for himself, which he then didn’t even eat. (Disappointing. They’d had to order takeout when Hardison got hungry at 1 a.m. Eliot hadn’t wanted anything, and when they ordered his usual pho anyway, he ate a couple of bites and then seemed to forget it was there.) He was like an Eliot-robot that did the things Eliot did but only in a bad imitation.

He’d already worked out twice and showered twice. If he went to work out again, she might scream.

With a tired groan, Hardison stretched and got up from the couch, putting his laptop aside. As he wandered over to the kitchen, his eyes were on Eliot, and he didn’t even try to hide that he was scared and unhappy. They’d both stopped trying to get anything out of Eliot an hour ago, after his reactions had gone from snapping back whenever they tried to get a rise out of him to grumbled monosyllables and wordless grunts to silent shrugs, almost-glowers, and retreats. The last time she’d poked at him he’d just looked numb and defeated. It was horrible.

Hardison’s eyes went hard and his mouth turned stubborn, and she knew he was going to try one more time. As he passed behind the kitchen island, he glanced down. “Oh hey, man, is this your sandwich? One of your _special_ sandwiches? You gonna abandon your food here, I’m gonna eat it. Finder’s rules.” Smirking, he reached for the sandwich.

“ _NO!_ ”

She was on her feet when Eliot roared, taser out as he charged—

—and he _tripped_ , stumbled over his own feet, and crashed into the island. Grabbing onto it for support, he lunged up and swatted at the plate, a wild, uncoordinated swing that smacked it off the counter top. It smashed against the cabinets, sending shards of china and layers of sandwich all over the floor.

Hardison had leaped back and was pressed against the sink, his own taser out, his hand trembling. “H-hey, it’s cool,” he stammered, his eyes wide. “You don’t want me to touch your food, okay, I won’t touch your food—”

“I,” Eliot gritted out. “I...had. My mouth. On that.” Leaning hard on his elbows, he slumped forward over the counter, his head drooping, as if the strength had gone out of him. His hair, drying into messy waves, hung down over his face. Parker wanted to cry.

Instead, she looked at Hardison. Their eyes met, and that thing happened—the magical thing where they already knew what was in each other’s heads without a word being spoken, something she’d never had before Leverage. Putting her taser away, she went to the refrigerator, took out the bag, and handed it to Hardison. The plastic crinkled as he removed the tupperware and set it on the counter between himself and Eliot.

“Please, man,” he said, and glass was less fragile than the way his voice sounded. If even a feather landed on it, it might break. “I don’t know if this will do anything. I don’t know if it’ll help. But please.” He slid the container closer to Eliot. “ _Try._ ”

After a long moment, Eliot reached out and rested his hand on the lid.

“Go away,” he muttered.

She took Hardison by the arm and led him away.

She drew him into their bedroom, pulled him with her onto the bed. She felt his surprise when she curled up against him, fitting herself into the bend of his arm, her head tipped against his shoulder. He and Eliot were so good about accommodating her when she couldn’t be with people, when she couldn’t be touched, when she had to _get out_. So she accommodated him now. She lay still, eyes closed, her arm draped across his chest, visualizing the Hope Diamond and counting its facets in her head to keep herself distracted from the prickling under her skin, and she didn’t listen to whatever was happening in the other room.

She’d finished the Hope itself and was about half way through the sixteen smaller diamonds in its setting when water started running in the sink, loud enough that she didn’t need to focus to hear it. Some of the tension had begun leaving Hardison’s body. A few minutes later, she caught the nasty smell of bleach ( _of gray rooms and corridors that she was never going back to, of a green-tiled bathroom that she was_ never _going back to_ ), and her face twisted in loathing. But she lay without moving until the water stopped, and then until she heard the creak-squeak of someone sitting down.

She unwound herself from Hardison and slipped off the bed. In the living room, the windows were starting to show the first dull light of morning. Eliot was sitting on the couch, leaning forward, his head in his hands. She approached slowly, careful to come up in his peripherals. When she stopped a few feet behind him, he didn’t react.

“...Eliot?”

He turned and looked up at her.

Sometimes Eliot’s face was simple. A scowl. A sly grin. The heat of his gaze when they were skin against skin. The wolf-fierce focus when he fought. And sometimes his expressions were more complicated than those of anyone else she’d ever known. Like that time when he’d told them about working for Moreau. Every shift of the muscles in his face, every flicker of his eyes had spoken of emotions twisting and interlocking like a diamond-cut Singapore chain, its links edged and glitter bright. This was similar. She’d gotten better at reading people since then, and better at knowing Eliot, so she could name some of those feelings now. Anguish. Anger. Shame. The crack into a shiver-soft vulnerability that made her want to hold her breath, that was too rare and delicate even to try to steal. He _hurt_ , and it made _her_ hurt too.

But he knew her.

He was _Eliot_.

She hesitated toward touching him, and his face closed down again, but it was just a normal Eliot-boundary now, not a blank. “I need some space,” he said. His voice was low but not harsh—not a rejection, but really a need, and she drew her hand back. Eliot stood, glancing beyond her at Hardison—they held each other’s gaze, and then Eliot gave a barely there nod before walking past them. She turned to watch him go, and Hardison turned with her, stepping back at the same time so he could lay his hand on her shoulder, that brief job-is-done, all-is-good touch.

Eliot paused at the doorway of the second bedroom. Then, visibly making some decision, he kept on going and disappeared into _their_ room.

He left the door open.

* * *

_Breathe. Breathe._

_Focus on the solidity of the floor underneath him, the weight and balance of his body, the lift and fall of his chest, the line from tailbone to spine to crown._

_Let the thoughts come, look at them, and let them go._

So. He’d done that. Not the most disgusting thing he’d ever eaten, but—never before any part of a human being. Another line he’d crossed.

_Breathe._

Maybe someday he’d ask himself if it had been worth it. Right now he couldn’t question. Because Parker and Hardison were safe, the static was out of his head, he knew who he was and who they were, and he’d eat a hundred fucking brains before he’d let himself be lost bad enough to hurt them.

Not that they weren’t at risk. He’d taken that fucker’s blood across his face, into his eyes and mouth, not much, but apparently enough. Which meant that _his_ blood was a danger, and he bled plenty in his line of work. Maybe his spit was contaminated too. Any part of him could be a threat to them. He just didn’t know.

Hardison would know. Hardison would figure it out. _Trust_.

_Breathe._

Breathing. He ought to be a dead thing, but somehow he wasn’t. He breathed. His heart beat—slow, Hardison said, but apparently enough. His temperature was low; his hands were cold and slightly numb, and his toes and fingertips dark and purpled, like a bruise. And even though he’d eaten, the hunger ripped at him like teeth in his gut, a hole torn into something infinite and empty.

He’d been hungry before. He’d lived with pain before. This was just hunger. This was just pain.

 _Are you suffering?_ Hardison had asked. Suffering was when you got stuck on the idea that there was no way out. Suffering was when you wanted something you could never have. If you could let go, you would never suffer. Let go of hope, let go of want, let go of need—at the end, if necessary, let go of life.

(He was never going to allow Hardison to be the one to pull that trigger.)

_Breathe. Let go._

So. He was what he was. All the things he’d become over the years of his life, some of them worse than others. Now he was this. Deal with it. Rage and let go. Regret and move on.

(As long as he could be the hands that kept the people he loved safe. When that ended for good, when he started turning into their downfall, then he was done.)

Somebody was in the doorway. Familiar, not a threat. He opened his eyes and squinted. Even with the louvered blinds closed, the room seemed too bright, and his eyes didn’t adjust like normal. Parker was watching him, but he’d already known—of course it was Parker. Hardison would’ve made more noise. And...he could _smell_ her, her familiar scent but also something _more_ , even from across the room. It was weird, but...in a nice way?

Reassuring, somehow.

“Hi!” Parker said. “You doing okay?” Confident Parker was like a cat hunting, all slink and stalk and pounce; nervous Parker went angular and jerky, like a wading bird. A heron, or an egret. This was bird-Parker, smiling her cracked, unsure smile.

“Yeah. I’m good.” Good enough, for sure. In any case, nothing she needed to worry about just then. She perked up, though she didn’t entirely relax.

“Um. So we were going to be working on something,” half pivot, gesture to the living room, swivel back, like some awkwardly robotic dance move, “and it’s a surprise. Sooo—can we close the door for a while?”

He narrowed his eyes at her, though with the squinting, he wasn’t sure she could tell. Was this likely to be a _good_ surprise, or a _get me away from these people_ surprise? But their worst had gotten less terrible over the years, or maybe he’d just built up a tolerance, and they’d likely find some way to do whatever it was they were planning no matter what he did or said, so he might as well just sit back and let them get on with it. “Sure, that’s fine.”

“You’re not going to go all—” Stretching her arms out woodenly in front of her, she took a few stiff-legged, shuffling steps in place, her face exaggeratedly blank.

“ _No_ , Parker.” Though it wasn’t an unreasonable question. Those first hours, locked in the other room—he didn’t remember it clearly, but somehow he’d gotten lost in there. Just fallen into the nothingness like going under some drug, without even a last moment of realizing what was happening to him. All he had left from then were patches of a blurry, half-anesthetized haze where nothing was real but the waiting and the hunger. Where Hardison’s voice had been a droning noise with no meaning, and his presence a crackling like fire, a sizzle along his nerves. God, if Hardison’s scream hadn’t gotten through....

“I’m okay now,” he said. “I am. Thanks to you guys.” The smile he had for her was actually genuine. He hadn’t been this clear headed since he’d turned. “It’s crazy, and I don’t know how it even works, but it helped.” And Parker settled finally, coming down off the balls of her feet, the tension in her expression softening.

“Do you need anything?” she asked.

He thought about it. “A laptop.” Maybe he’d watch something. “Otherwise I think I’m good. Might take a nap.”

She winced. “We’re probably going to be pretty loud.”

What the—no, he wasn’t going to ask. “It’s fine,” he said again. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay. Be right back!” She left, and he unfolded himself from the floor, tested his legs. Better than before, but he hoped he could work out the rest of the stiffness before there was trouble and he needed to move for real. Assuming it was left over from last night and not a new normal. Damn it.

By the time Parker came back, he was at the mirror, fighting with his hair. Looked like a goddamn bird’s nest. Giving up, he glared at his reflection. His eyes looked really fucking weird, too, all pupil, black and empty. They were creeping _him_ out, never mind what other people would think. With a grunt of disgust, he tossed the hair brush onto the dresser and sat down on the bed, still holding his own gaze like it was a challenge.

“Here you go,” Parker said brightly, dumping a laptop next to him. As he glanced up at her, she bent like she meant to kiss his temple, and he gently put up a hand to block her.

“Better not,” he said with a wry quirk of a smile. Her face fell, but she nodded and reached out to touch his hair instead. And there it was again, the same as when Hardison had put hands on him with all that medical testing nonsense, a barely there tingling under his skin—like what he’d felt when the hunger had taken him, but nothing more than a whisper, not that all-consuming roar. He had no idea what he was picking up on. But at least it didn’t seem to be messing with his head this time.

“ ’Kay,” Parker said. “See you soon.” She slipped out of the room, closing the door behind her, and once it was shut (not locked, he noted) he fell backward onto the mattress, huffing a sigh.

Sleeping sounded like a good idea, actually. He couldn’t remember if he’d nodded off at any point during the night, but probably not. He’d better catch some rest while he could. Wriggling farther up the bed, he paused to eye the pillow. Safe to lay on it? Not safe? Fucking hell. He decided he could wash it on the sanitize setting after he was done. Or just toss it and get a new one, though that was wasteful. Warily he settled on his back and closed his eyes. Concern had tensed him up again, but even so...it was good to be laying there, the achy good that he treasured because it was his even if he didn’t deserve it. If he believed in miracles, having this place—these people—this home—would be one for sure.

Starting to drift, he realized he was lying in a cloud of scent. Parker’s. And Hardison’s. Familiar, but—stronger. Richer. Like new flavors blending together into something complex. He couldn’t identify them all yet, but he could learn them, he thought: the feelings they carried, the silent story they were telling. Turning onto his side, he inhaled deeply, taking them in, and surrounded by that comfort, he dozed off.

— _voices_. Strangers. Something heavy being carried and set down. And Hardison’s voice, relaxed, giving instructions. So it was okay.

The (probably) delivery people left, and he slipped back into a half drowse, peripherally aware of things being moved around and Parker and Hardison talking. And then the power tools started.

 _Argh._ Well. Parker _did_ say they were going to be loud.

By the time peace and quiet returned, he’d given up trying to snooze and was watching some movie about horse racing on the laptop, using a pair of earbuds he’d found on the nightstand to help shut out what sounded like a goddamn garage door opener. (Questions. He had so many questions. He wondered if he really wanted to know the answers.) The silence was both a relief and slightly ominous.

“Oh, Elllliot,” Hardison singsonged eventually, knocking on the door. “You awake in there?”

“You actually think I’d be sleeping through all that?” Eliot shut the laptop and pocketed the earbuds, on the off chance that ear wax could carry zombie virus. Instead of answering, Hardison just opened the door, and grandly beckoned him out.

“So,” Hardison said, sauntering backward so he could face Eliot as they approached the living room, “you wanted to be locked down when we couldn’t keep an eye on you. Okay, cool, I appreciate that. Very noble and self-sacrificing of you. But being all by yourself in the spare bedroom? That didn’t seem to work out so well. Now, maybe we’ve resolved that issue so it’s not going to be a problem any more, but just in case, I figured we ought to have an alternative solution.” He stepped aside and into a theatrical “ta-da” pose. “Behold the ultimate in zombie Eliot Spencer restraint systems.”

“Woohoo!” Parker cheered.

Okay. So. That was...an _extremely_ high-end recliner. Seriously, it was to his dad’s old La-Z-Boy as Nate’s Tesla was to the first junker car he’d ever owned. Eliot approached it, half wary and half admiring. It was big, but not so much as to dominate the room, and the furniture had been moved around so as to fit it in next to the couch, both seats angled to have a prime view of the TV. He came around the side, brushing his fingers across the espresso-colored (real) leather, and noted the chains running around and under the cushions. He raised his eyebrows at Hardison.

“C’mon, let’s get you set up,” Hardison said, grabbing hold of the restraints, and Parker swooped in to help. Getting cuffed didn’t bring back the best memories, but he kept hold of himself and submitted to it. The system was complicated (of course, because Hardison had come up with it). There was a harness that looped around his shoulders and chest as well as a waist strap. Chains attached to separated wrist cuffs ran through martin links on the belt, left to right and right to left, so they crossed in front of his body, like high-security prisoner transport shackles, but loose. The leg irons were standard, with connected ankle cuffs. And chains from the harness, belt, and leg irons, as well as the wrist cuff chains, all disappeared into the chair somehow. When Parker and Hardison were done, he found himself standing in front of it, restraints dangling off him everywhere.

“How’s that?” Hardison asked. “Comfortable?”

“Too much slack, man.” Eliot gestured widely to demonstrate. His arms had full range of motion, and he definitely shouldn’t be able to stand up like this. “Nice try, but not gonna work.”

“Ah-ah!” Hardison waggled a remote at him, smirking. “We’re not done yet. Now sit down before you get pulled down.”

The fuck? But he sat, and Parker moved around him, adjusting the lie of the chains. When she nodded and stepped back, Hardison pushed a button—with a rumbling whirr he could feel through the seat, the chains started retracting, and he tensed. “It’s okay, relax,” Hardison said, easy and soothing, and he forced himself to go loose, let the thing happen. When the mechanism stopped, he was settled back against the cushions, most of the slack taken up, but not enough that he felt like he was strapped down tight. “How’s that?” Hardison asked.

“Hmm. Better.” His arms had about a foot and a half of leeway to move; he could lean forward some but not stand, lift his feet but not kick. He glanced up at Hardison, who nodded.

“That’s the low-level restraint.” Hardison held up the remote again. “This is the high-level one.” He pushed another button, and the machine started up. “Say when.”

Now he started feeling the straps. They drew in until he was pressed firmly against the seat back; the wrist chains pulled at his arms until they were crossed over his torso, his hands locked down by his waist. “There,” he said, and the whirring stopped.

“Not too tight?” Hardison asked.

“Nah.” He tugged on the wrist chains, then jerked at them as hard as he could, which in his awkward position wasn’t very hard at all. Yep, high-risk restraints; no freedom of movement. He tried slamming his weight to one side, then the other, but the chair didn’t shift an inch.

“The mechanism’s bolted to the floor, and then the chair’s bolted down over it,” Hardison explained, looking smug. “Ain’t no way this thing’s moving.”

“Heh. Nice. Wish I’d had this in Venezuela.” Or any of the other half-dozen or so places where he’d been strung up by the wrists. When he’d told the two of them to chain him, he’d pictured being attached to a wall or the floor, maybe to a bed if he was lucky. In comparison, this was so cushy it was ridiculous.

“Nice?” Hardison was saying. “You think that’s nice? Brother, you ain’t heard _half_ the features of this chair yet.” Pulling another remote out of a pocket on the chair, he leaned close and started pointing at controls. “You’ve got your lumbar heating, your eight-point massage system with four vibration modes, regular recline _and_ extra-relaxing gravity-chair mode.” He tapped on the chair’s headrest. “Wireless Bluetooth speakers, so you can listen to TV or music, podcast, whatever, in the middle of the night without waking us up. Phone charger here in the arm—I put an app on your phone to control all the multimedia and the lights, and also there’s a panic button, in case we’re out of the house or something and you need us.” Hardison opened up a panel on a side table, which was also new. “And this here’s a mini-fridge, in case you want to keep a couple of cold ones close by.” Closing the fridge, Hardison straightened up, grinning. “So? What do you think?”

He hardly even knew what to think. It was so—much. He gave a distracted tug at the wrist chains, and Hardison must have noticed and pushed a button, because there was a clicking under the seat and the restraints all relaxed back to the first level. He stared at his hands as he set them on the arm rests, fingers slowly curling over the ends.

“This,” he said at last, “is _awesome_.”

Hardison whooped and punched the air. “Hell _yeah_ it’s awesome! _I’m_ gonna be in that chair when you’re not using it. In fact, you’re just lucky I didn’t keep it all for myself.”

“Hey, man, this is my chair. No take backs,” he laughed. “Seriously, though, this is great.” Next moment, Parker was happily slinging herself into his lap, throwing her legs over the chair’s arm (and his). Catching some of her exuberance, he almost kissed her before he caught himself and quickly ducked to bump his forehead against her cheek instead. Curling an arm around his head, she held him close like that, and he let her, breathing soft against her neck, feeling those tiny sparks of energy singing through him.

When she released him, he looked up and met Hardison’s eyes, dark, smiling, warm like a slow fire. His heart twisted over, and he worked his arm out from underneath Parker so he could raise it to the length of the chain. Slap, slap, fist-bump, and at the end of it he caught Hardison’s hand and held on tight.

So many damn feelings, he felt like he could crack open from them. The gift of the world’s most over-the-top chair was the least of it. It was this: holding and being held, surrounded by their bodies, their heat, by their mingled scents, overwhelming and so good— _delicious_ , he tried not to think because that was seriously messed up—by their presence, live and breathing, so close that he could feel them practically soaking into him, humming in his bones and down along every nerve. By their trust, even now, even considering what he was. He could drown in them, in his love and need for them that hurt almost like the hunger, but sweeter.

“Thanks,” he murmured, finally letting go of Hardison’s hand. Swallowing against the catch in his voice, he added, trying to sound dry and not nearly so impressed, “You’re gonna have to leave me the chair remote, though, at least when we’re at low security.” He groped in the general direction of the side table, hindered as much by Parker leaning on him as by the wrist restraint. “Otherwise, I can’t reach the fridge.”

“This is why we have beta testing,” Hardison said. “Don’t worry, we’ll work out the kinks.” Parker snorted, and Hardison’s lips twitched as he caught the double entendre. “In the meantime, since we’ve got you here....” Hardison went over to his geek station and came back with a small, boxy device. “The EKG device arrived, so I want to do some readings.”

Eliot glared at him, soft mood fading. “You did _not_ trap me in this so you can run tests on me.”

“Of course not! That’s just, let’s say, a side benefit.” Hardison didn’t look nearly sorry enough for having betrayed him. In fact, he didn’t look sorry at all.

“I take back every nice thing I ever thought about you,” Eliot growled.

“C’mon, man, I made you this freaking cool chair. You can pay me back by letting me do science on you.” He was already messing around with wires and electrodes and crap, and had Eliot mentioned that medical equipment was included in his general dislike of doctors? “Anyway, this is for your own benefit. It’s to help figure out what’s going on in that body of yours, so we can keep on top of it if anything changes. I got an electroencephalograph headset coming too; that’s gonna be fun to play with.”

Anyone else would get a beat down for this. Hardison and Parker, he’d forgive. Because he loved them, and because he knew that if he said no, really flat-out said no instead of just putting up a grumbling protest, they’d respect that. So as the two of them started discussing whether they could attach the electrodes up under his shirt or if they’d have to undo the chest harness to get it off him, he rolled his eyes and settled back in the chair, resigned to his fate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: A for-profit body donation center with heads in buckets? [Totally a thing that exists](https://qz.com/914490/theres-a-completely-legal-reason-this-american-dentist-has-an-office-full-of-human-heads/). [Body brokers](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-bodies-fbi-exclusive/exclusive-fbi-agents-raid-headquarters-of-major-u-s-body-broker-idUSKBN1D72SL) target poor people who can't afford burial or cremation, and some of the uses those bodies and parts get put to are...not nice. This is some real-life Leverage shit, y'all. 
> 
> (The things you learn while researching for fics....)
> 
> Oh, and that horse racing movie Eliot's watching? It's a movie called _50 to 1_ , starring some guy called Christian Kane. :D


	3. Chapter 3

Twenty-four hours post-infection, and everything had returned to normal, if normal was defined by Eliot being a pissy baby about the contents of their kitchen.

“Does this look fresh to you? I don’t think so!” Eliot shook the container of brain leftovers in their general direction and then threw it in the garbage can.

“Hey! I got that for you! And it was a really traumatic experience.” Parker snatched the brains out of the trash and shoved them back in the refrigerator. Eliot looked like he was on the verge of exploding, and Alec quickly put himself between the two of them and the fridge as a distraction before they got into a tug of war or some other fool thing with the tupperware and brains got all over the floor.

“Whoa, whoa—hey, now,” he soothed, raising his hands in a peacemaking, e _verybody just calm down_ gesture before turning to Eliot. “Look, man, we don’t know how often you’ll need to, uh, you know, so we gotta keep a supply on hand. It’s not that easy to just run out and pick up a brain whenever.” Parker tossed her head, looking vindicated, though still pissed off.

“Says you,” Eliot snarled. Grabbing his keys, he shook a finger at Alec. “You and me—we’re goin’ shopping.”

“Say _what_?”

“Fine!” Parker snapped. “You boys have fun.” She vaulted onto the kitchen island, leaped from there to the trapeze swing, and then scrambled up into the rafters, where she dramatically ignored them.

“Parker—” Eliot started to yell at her for being on the counter, then cut himself off, since she wasn’t anymore. With a last glare, he stomped toward the door, and Alec trailed behind him, wondering just where one went shopping for brains at five-something p.m. on a Sunday.

Which was how he found himself standing around in some sketchy South Asian supermarket while Eliot dickered with the shouty elderly woman behind the butcher counter in a mixture of English and what Alec’s language app had tentatively identified as a dialect of Urdu. With his scruff, bandana, and shades, Eliot was rocking the disreputable badass look. The old lady gave the impression that she could take him down without even breaking a sweat.

At last they sorted out whatever they were discussing, and as the lady handed several packages of Alec-did-not-even-want-to-know-what to Eliot, she beamed, going from ferocious guardian of the meats to happy granny in the blink of an eye. Eliot smiled back, one of his softer ones, although it lost something when you couldn’t see the warmth in his eyes. As he turned away from the counter and came over to where Alec was standing, the smile dropped like a punched-out bad guy. Alec didn’t take it personally. That was just the default Eliot face.

“Think you got enough stuff in there there?” he asked, warily glancing into Eliot’s shopping basket. Everything was discreetly wrapped in brown paper, for which he was glad.

“Like you said, we don’t know how much I’m gonna need, or how often. I can cook some up and freeze it.” His mouth tightened. “I don’t even know if this’ll work, or if it has to be,” he lowered his voice, “human.” God, Alec hoped not, because terrible ethical quandaries aside (and that was a _major_ thing to have to get past), grocery shopping was going to be a hell of a lot easier than breaking into a medical facility every time they needed to stock up. Eliot looked at the pack of Gatorade in Alec’s hand, which he’d taken the risk of leaving Eliot alone for two minutes to grab. “Didn’t know you drank that stuff.”

“I don’t. This is for you. Gotta keep you hydrated, get your electrolytes back up where they ought to be.”

“Huh.” Eliot looked thoughtful. “Good idea. Not the orange, though.” He brushed past Alec, heading for the drinks aisle, where after a moment of contemplation he picked out the fruit punch flavor variety. Fruit punch! He’d’ve thought Mr. Gourmet Cook would have better taste than that.

“ _What?_ You got something against orange? You are prejudiced, man. Prejudiced against the orange.” People were staring at him as he trailed after Eliot. This was nothing new. In fact, it was comfortably familiar.

“I might mix it up with one of your sodas,” Eliot retorted. “That stuff is terrible for you.”

“Like your nasty athletics drink is any better. Here, let me pull you up some comparative nutrition information—” He got out his phone, started to key in a search as they walked, and ran right into Eliot’s arm, extended to stop him. Surprised, he looked up, followed the direction of Eliot’s gaze, and stiffened. Ahead of them, on the end cap of one of the registers, a newspaper headline blared, “Unknown Infection: Research park still closed as public health officials investigate mystery disease outbreak.”

“Word’s already getting out,” Alec murmured. “We gotta get moving on this.”

Eliot knocked the back of his hand twice against Alec’s chest in wordless acknowledgment and agreement. “Just let me grab a few spices real quick,” he said, equally quiet, “and we’ll get out of here.”

“I am honestly disturbed by how good that smells,” Alec said as Eliot entered the briefing room carrying a bowl that quite possibly had come straight from curry heaven, because the wafting aroma could only be described as divine. If he didn’t know what was in there, he’d be tempted to try to steal some. The scary part was that he was still tempted.

Eliot hitched himself up onto one of the chairs. “It’s maghaz masala. Had it a couple of times in Pakistan. Never made it myself, though.” He tried a spoonful and did the head tilt and eyebrow twitch combo that meant _acceptable but I could still improve on this._

“Wait, so you’ve eaten brains before?” Parker was draped over the desk, one seat away from Eliot and with her body angled away from him, about 80 percent over her sulk but still giving him a squinty-eyed look.

“ ’Course I’ve eaten brains,” Eliot said, as if that was a perfectly normal thing that everybody could be expected to have put in their mouth at one time or another. Noticing Alec’s stare, he returned a flat look. “You can buy pork brains in a can from Walmart. If you shop at Walmart, which I _don’t_.” He stabbed his spoon into the bowl for emphasis as he scooped up another mouthful.

“Then what was all that ‘oh no, not a brain, I can’t eat a brain’ stuff?” Parker had dropped her voice into something approaching Eliot’s register, but her vaguely dramatic hand-wave was just not something Alec could ever see Eliot doing. She’d caught Eliot mid-chew, and he had to force down a swallow before he could answer.

“Because that was a _human brain_ , Parker.” He didn’t raise his voice, but the words had the force of a shout, the intensity of a tooth-bared snarl. In the pause that followed, Parker sat up, her eyes widening and her lips moving in a soundless _oh_. Alec thought he could see her math and where it had gone wrong: Brain A equals gross and creepy, and Brain B equals gross and creepy, so Brain A equals Brain B—Q.E.D. Eliot was watching her refigure things, and while that was definitely an angry Eliot-face, it was a surprisingly low-key anger. Eliot knew how Parker was, the way her mind came at things from strange angles, and there hadn’t been a wrathful _what’s wrong with you_ in a long time. Some affectionate ones, maybe, but not a wrathful one.

Alec sort of wondered what was wrong with _him_ that he was more than clear about the not-rightness of what they’d done and yet he’d still sent Parker out to raid that organ seller without the least hesitation. But that was the way they all were for each other—that was how deep and true the feelings ran—and while there had to be a limit to what he’d do for their sakes, he apparently hadn’t reached it yet. A bit scary, that.

“Also, it was raw,” Eliot added, and Parker wrinkled her nose in disgust.

“Okay! Changing the subject now!” Alec blurted, before his too-vivid imagination made him start thinking about the mouth-feel of raw gray matter and he barfed all over the floor. He clicked the screens awake and brought up a street view of the building they’d so recently escaped from. “Let us now return to AdVitam Medical Innovations, whose innovations apparently include releasing a zombie plague upon the world.” He noticed that Eliot was still squinting despite the lights being at half strength, and he lowered them further. Eliot gave him a brief nod of thanks. “As we speak, various agencies have homed in on their local facility and set up a perimeter around it. Unfortunately, their leaders are in a deadlock right now over who exactly has jurisdiction in this situation, so the people on the ground are standing around with their thumbs up their collective asses waiting for someone to clear them to take action.”

“Typical,” Eliot muttered. “Government bureaucracy is the worst.” He eyed Parker, who was now gazing at his dinner with curious interest, and shifted the bowl farther away from her.

Alec nodded. “Since nobody’s been in there yet—except us, of course—there’s very little information. Basically all they know is that there’s a major biohazard and no one should be going in without protection. And the only reason they know this much is on account of their patient zero.” He opened several image files, all showing different views of a young woman in a hospital bed, and cycled through them.

“Emilia,” Parker said, turning her full attention to the screens. Her voice had gone sharp-focused, her mind switching over to mastermind mode.

“Yep. Our client’s missing sister.” He quirked a mirthless smile at Parker. “You were right, someone did get out, and it was her. Tragically, not before she was infected. Now, I’m putting this together from pieces, so I might not have the whole story, but it seems like she was able to contact 911 and warn them that she was extremely contagious. By the time they found her, though, she’d already converted and was wandering around the research park area.” He’d stopped on a closeup of her face, framed by a head restraint that was holding her still. Her lightless black eyes stared fixedly at the camera. Their blankness was unsettling, but it wasn’t as bad as the videos where she was screaming. He’d left those out of the presentation; they just plain gave him the heebie-jeebies.

“Right now she’s being kept in isolation at Providence Milwaukie Hospital,” he went on, “while they try to figure out what’s going on with her. They got a nationwide team of top disease specialists all video-conferencing with each other at all hours of the day—which is great for us, ’cause it means they’ve posted all her data up in a file sharing service. And by the way, this so-called HIPAA-compliant cloud storage system they’ve got is really not making me feel so secure in my medical privacy.” With the press of a few more buttons, he replaced Emilia’s image with a set of charts. “Anyhow, here’s her information on the left, and on the right we’ve got Eliot’s, just for comparison. Below, we have your more-or-less average human being.” Activating the remote’s laser pointer, he started indicating areas on the charts. “Now, if you look here at the interval between these two peaks—”

“ _No_ , you can’t have any. Don’t, don’t—damnit, _no_ , that’s got my spit on it!”

“Well, okay then, I just won’t use your spoon.”

“Doesn’t matter! It goes from my mouth _back_ into the bowl, and, and—do you even know how a spoon _works_?”

“Of _course_ I know how a spoon works—"

“Guys—”

“Why are you so hot to try this anyway? You’re not going to like it.”

“You got me wondering what it’s like! I mean, is it chewy? Squishy?”

“Kids— _kids_! Kindergarten is in session here.” He needed a long ruler or something to smack on the desk. (Maybe one of his lightsabers—one of the cheap ones, of course, and definitely _not_ the Master Replica Luke Skywalker Force-FX signed by Mark Hamill himself, no matter how cool the sounds were.) With a sigh, he gave up the attempt to demonstrate his medical mastery and returned to more case-related matters.

“So. They got her, they IDed her, they talked to her brother and looked at her background, and as soon as it came up that she worked in a medical research company, well, not too much of a stretch to guess where she got infected. Trouble is, now they don’t got anyone else to ask questions of. None of the local AdVitam people are picking up the phone—wonder why—and the company’s head honchos down in the main office are disclaiming any knowledge of what their people up here were getting into. Their official stance is that of course they would not support the engineering of a potentially lethal and definitely highly infectious biological agent because that would be super dangerous, and also bad and wrong. To which I say: _Bull. Shit._ Remember that crazy lady at Wakefield with the wheat? There is no end to what some companies will do for profit.” He paused to take a breath and shake off the memory of what had been one of the scarier jobs they’d done. “So,” he continued, “our sources of information are all locked up in an evil corporate headquarters, a zombie-infested research lab, and Emilia Cruz, who is apparently nonverbal right now.”

“Great,” Eliot muttered. “So where do we start?”

Alec looked at Parker, who was biting her lip, deep in thought. “We know they wiped the servers at the lab,” he offered. “There may still be information on individual computers, but until that lab gets cleared out, ain’t nobody accessing those. And no offense, Eliot, ’cause I know that with proper preparation you could go all Bruce Campbell on their asses—and yes, I know that Bruce Campbell did not fight zombies, he fought evil spirits, let me have my metaphor, please—but I would really, really prefer not to do that if we can avoid it.”

Parker nodded. “Yeah, too much risk, maybe for nothing. Let’s leave that part to the law guys. We can always steal the information back from them later.”

“Yes, good,” Alec said. “Now as to the other options....” He hesitated, weighing them in his mind, though he already knew which way his heart was tending. “I would lay good odds that AdVitam is not as innocent as they claim. But maybe— _maybe_ —they are. And we have Emilia right here in Portland. And if we can help...if there’s something from what we’ve learned with Eliot that can help bring her back....” He looked over at Eliot, and somehow, even though those drowning-dark pupils hid the usual flicker in Eliot’s gaze, he could read the man’s response in subtle shifts of tension and relaxation around his eyes: intense emotion, decision, permission.

“Yes,” Parker said. She’d been watching Eliot too, and now she turned back to Alec and nodded, a wisp of a smile on her face. “We help her if we can. That’s what we do.”

Any self-doubts Alec might’ve had melted away before his partners’ certainty. “I already talked to Kenneth, by the way, told him we’re still on the case,” he said. “So I know he’ll be happy to see us. Now, as to how we’re going to help—you guys may think I’m crazy, but I feel like, on this one, we should maybe play things straight. Or, well, mostly straight. As straight as we get, anyway.” Parker tilted her head, looking puzzled. “Not our usual method, I know. But they’re not the bad guys here. So does this all really rate a con?”

“Hmm.” Parker didn’t look or sound entirely convinced..

Eliot’s expression had gone dark and closed off, like he was starting to regret his decision. “So what’re we gonna do, walk in through the front door and say, ‘Hey, we broke into that lab the other day, here’s some more virus for you to work with’? ’Cause yeah, I want to help, but I’m not gonna be anyone’s guinea pig.”

“Well, I was thinking I’d at least set up an appointment first,” Alec teased, which earned him an Eliot glower. Sometimes the man just had no sense of humor. Although actually, calling ahead was sort of the plan. “Look, trust me, man. We are _not_ going to let them mess with you.”

“If they try, I’ll just stab them in the eyes,” Parker said, way too casually for Alec’s comfort. “There are lots of sharp things in hospitals.”

“Hey, stabbing things, last resort, okay?” He’d thought they’d gotten Parker past that gut reaction. “Anyway, what I’m saying is, we’re not going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to. But there’s things you can tell them that Emilia can’t, tests they can run that I just don’t have the equipment or know-how to do. Anything we can offer them would be a help. We let them know that they’ll take us on our own terms or nothing—they push, we walk.” He smirked. “And if they push too hard, we run like hell. Don’t need to tell them that part, of course.”

“Fine,” Eliot growled. “I’m only doing this for Emilia’s sake. You know how I feel about hospitals.”

Yes, everyone knew very well, so Alec didn’t bother to address the subject. “So that’s it?” he asked instead. “We’re decided?” He looked from Eliot back to Parker. She gave a short, determined nod, and Alec grinned. “Great. I’ll start making the arrangements. Oh, hey, hey,” he added, as Parker and Eliot started to rise, “can I do the thing this time?”

Eliot rolled his eyes, but Parker just smiled. “Yes, Hardison. You can do the thing.”

“Whoo, yeah! Ahem.” Clearing his throat, he struck a pose, and said, with an attitude of suave authority—much more suave than Nate had ever managed, that was for sure, “Okay, y’all—let’s go steal ourselves an infectious disease specialist.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mmm, [pork brains](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Rose-Pork-Brains-in-Milk-Gravy/190858704)! Only $9.95!
> 
> (No, I've never actually eaten brains myself. Maybe if Eliot cooked them....)


	4. Chapter 4

Meredith hung up the video chat and buried her head in her hands. Another useless meeting. Well, maybe not entirely useless on the research end—they had confirmation that they were indeed dealing with a virus, or at least something viruslike. They hadn’t narrowed down exactly what type it was, though, and there was nothing new in terms of actual _treatment_. She was still fumbling around trying to provide palliative care for a patient who was clearly in profound distress but couldn’t explain why. Sedation was the only thing that seemed to help at all, but keeping her completely under meant they wouldn’t be able to see any subtle signs of mental improvement.

Huffing a frustrated sigh, she unmuted her phone and checked for calls. There was a voicemail from an Alec Hardison, asking her to call him as soon as possible. Did she know an Alec Hardison? He must be in her contacts, if his name was showing up. Frowning, she pushed the callback button.

The line picked up. “Dr. Tran,” said the man on the other end, before she’d even spoken, “thank you for returning my call.” His voice was smooth and assured, deliberately charming, with a trace of Black-dialect accent. He didn’t sound at all familiar.

She didn’t bother to be polite or patient. “How do you know me, Mr. Hardison?”

“Well, I don’t, not personally,” he said. “But I’ve been following your current case.” She tensed. They were in an information lock-down at the recommendation of the CDC. Only the barest facts were available to the public. There was nothing _to_ follow. “I’m part of a team of consultants who’ve been working with Kenneth Cruz, trying to locate his sister. I have some information that you might be interested in.”

That...made marginally more sense. “What kind of information?”

“I’ll be sending you an email in a moment,” he said, clearly evading the question. “Once you’ve had a chance to look at the attachment, if you’d like to discuss it further, please call. The email will be coming from leverage-international.org, in case it gets caught in your spam filter.” With a note of amusement creeping into his voice, he added, “I promise, it’s not a virus.”

“Isn’t that the kind of thing someone sending a virus would say?” she retorted. After a beat, the man laughed, sounding more natural.

“Looking forward to hearing from you,” he said, a grin evident in his voice, and hung up.

Damn it. As if she didn’t have enough to deal with. But she turned back to her computer and checked her email. There was the message, all right—“Thank you for your time,” read the subject line, and she snorted. The attachment was a PowerPoint file named “Comparative Patient Data.” Opening it, she started paging through the slides, and her breath caught in her chest.

These were medical test results, and Patient A had to be Emilia. She’d never seen such bizarre vitals before this case— _no one_ ever had, these should be impossible in a living person, but multiple readings on multiple pieces of equipment had all returned the same results. But this Patient B...not identical, no, but similar. Improbably, terrifyingly similar.

Grabbing her phone, she hit the call back button viciously. The man answered on the second ring, sounding pleased with himself. “Ah, Doctor—”

“If this is a fraud, I will have the law on your doorstep before you can even blink,” she snarled.

“Hey, hey, whoa—”

“ _Where_ did you get Emilia’s files?”

“Now, _that_ is an issue you should bring up with your IT department. Let’s just say they’re not as unavailable as you’d like them to be.”

She was going to bring something up with somebody, that was for sure. “And what about this...this other....”

“I have access to another subject with the virus,” he said, and a chill swept over her as her worst dread was realized.

“Where—how do you—do you know how _dangerous_ this thing could be?” she hissed.

“Believe me, I know. I don’t think this is something we should discuss over the phone, though. Let’s meet. The Bridgeport Brewing Company, at one o’ clock? I’ll text you the address.” With a chuckle, he added, “Don’t bring the law, though. They’re not invited.” And he hung up.

“ _Son_ of a—” She threw her phone onto a heap of papers on her desk and knotted her hands in her hair as she tried to decide what to do. If she had the sense God gave a turnip, she’d call all the forces of law and government down on that brew pub.

But in that case, this Hardison person might run, or if caught, refuse to talk, and they might never find out the location of that other patient. That had to be her absolute top priority. Find the second victim, determine their status, and get them into isolation as quickly as possible.

It was a public meeting place, at least. She mapped it, and it was only twenty minutes away. Checking her calendar, she noted that she did indeed have a stretch of free time that lined up perfectly with this meeting, and somehow she was entirely unsurprised.

She was going to have a _lot_ to say to IT when this was over.

The brew pub was in a former factory in the Pearl District. She’d googled the place as well as the Leverage International company and had also attempted to do a background check on this Alec Hardison, or at least as much of one as she could manage on her own in the midst of doing her actual work, since there wasn’t enough time to hire someone for a proper investigation. She hadn’t found anything overtly sketchy, but it didn’t mean that there wasn’t anything to find. The Leverage website in particular was vague about what exactly they did—something about providing assistance in seeking justice when all other routes had failed. And she’d learned almost nothing about Hardison other than the fact that he apparently owned the brew pub.

The interior of the pub was pleasant enough, more airy and welcoming than the industrial brick exterior had suggested. They were at the tail end of lunch time, so there were customers, but not too many.

“Dr. Tran.”

She recognized his voice from the phone call and turned to face him. Alec Hardison proved to be a tall, young Black man with a tight buzz cut and a trace of facial hair. Smiling widely, he stepped toward her, his hand extended. “I’m Hardison. Thanks for coming.” She stared flatly at his outstretched hand, then back up into his face, and after an awkward moment he dropped his arm, though his smile only faltered a little.

“This isn’t a social call,” she told him, each word clipped and precise. “You had some information to share.”

He bobbed his head. “Ah, yeah, that’s right. We should probably take this into the office.” Stepping back, he gestured for her to precede him.

So much for this being a _public_ meeting place. He must have noticed her stiffen, because his expression turned questioning, and then serious at last. Turning toward the bar, he called to a waitress standing there—a young Indian woman. “Hey, Amy—could you bring us some waters up in the back?”

“Sure thing!” the woman replied, smiling cheerfully, and Hardison started toward a hallway at one side of the room, leading the way this time and glancing back to see if she was following.

He was very good at reading people, she decided. She wasn’t sure if she liked being read. Part of her wanted to relax at the subtle ways he was trying to put her at ease, while another part was set even more on guard, because she couldn’t trust that he wasn’t just trying to manipulate her.

The hallway was a short corridor that opened up into a room within a room, a bare-brick space surrounding an equally minimalist wood-and-glass...office, she supposed, though it only held a single counterlike desk that faced a wall of video screens. The lighting in the office was dim, mostly spillover from the outer area. A doorway to the right opened onto what seemed like some sort of workroom, while a set of metal stairs on the left led up to a catwalk on the second floor. Oddly enough, there was a punching bag hanging from the stairs.

Sitting at one end of the desk was another man, which was a surprise she didn’t appreciate. He was alarmingly rough looking, not as tall as Hardison but compact and muscular, with long hair down to his shoulders and an expression as grim as Hardison’s was easy going. He was also wearing sunglasses indoors, which just made him seem even more suspicious.

“This is one of my partners, Eliot,” Hardison said. “Eliot, Dr. Tran.”

“Doc,” Eliot acknowledged. His voice was low, a little raspy, his accent noticeably Southern. She eyed him from the office doorway, wondering how hard she should balk at this new development and just how much she really needed the information they were claiming to offer.

Unfortunately, the answer to the latter was: a lot.

“Excuse me,” Amy said brightly, and Meredith had to step in through the doorway to let the other woman ease past. As Amy put a pitcher of ice water and a couple of glasses on the desk, she looked over at Eliot with faint surprise. “Oh. Should I have...?” She made a motion as if to go and get a third glass, but Eliot raised his hand and shook his head.

“Thanks, girl,” Hardison put in, smooth but also somehow sincere-sounding, and with another smile and a slightly quizzical glance at Meredith, the waitress left.

“I’d’ve asked her to stay,” Hardison said quietly as soon as she was gone, “but she don’t know about any of this.”

“Do you mind finally telling me what all ‘this’ is?” Meredith asked. Hardison had moved a chair around the desk so he was sitting on the other side of it, in front of the screens, so she came forward and faced him across that barrier. She kept half an eye on Eliot, a couple of seats away from her.

“Like I said on the phone, we’ve been working on Kenneth’s behalf, since the police weren’t inclined to take his concerns seriously.” Meredith nodded. That part seemed legitimate—she’d spoken to Kenneth herself and knew how heartbroken he was, not just about what had happened to his sister, but that he’d known something was wrong and hadn’t been able to do anything about it. He was younger than Emilia, probably in his early twenties, and to be honest he looked like exactly what he was: a scruffy kid with multiple piercings who played bass in a metal band. After he’d been thrown off AdVitam’s property for trespassing and threatened with arrest, the police had refused even to talk to him.

“She’d already been venting at him for a few days that something sketchy was going on,” Hardison continued, “but she couldn’t say much about it because of the NDA she’d had to sign when she was hired. When she dropped out of contact and Kenneth tried to find out what was going on, AdVitam’s reception desk stonewalled him and their security threw him out. On Saturday we were out talking to some of her coworkers’ friends and family—all variations on the same story. So two days ago we decided that we needed to take a look at things on the ground.”

“You...went to AdVitam.” Realization curdled inside her, turning first into shock, and then into a slowly congealing horror. “You went _into_ AdVitam.”

“Yes. Yes, we did.” Hardison looked grave and entirely serious, all casualness set aside for the moment. “And all the staff that’s missing...they’re still in there. And they’re just like Emilia. Only, not secured to a hospital bed.”

“Oh my god.” Her hand had risen to cover her mouth; she hadn’t even felt it happen. “They’re still there? What—what did you do?”

Hardison smiled mirthlessly. “We ran like bunnies. Ain’t no way we was gonna to stick around and get mauled to death by crazy people, even before we figured out they was infected with something.” His accent was slipping, she noticed vaguely, but she was distracted by the reality that was staring her in the face.

They’d been in a contaminated zone. Where had they gone since then? _What had they carried out with them?_ She could be looking at the beginning of an explosive epidemic.

“But you...you brought something out. Or someone. Didn’t you?” Panic was rising in her. “You have an infected subject. Where have you put them?”

“They’re here,” Hardison said with perfect calm. Now he looked amused.

“Here? _Here?_ ” She was barely keeping from screaming. “Are you crazy? They need to be put into isolation immediately! Take me to them. Right now!”

He was smirking— _smirking_ —his arms crossed on his chest, one hand stroking his chin. As she stared at him, he made a swirling gesture that seemed to encompass the space around them. She had absolutely no idea what that was supposed to mean.

“ _Hardison_ ,” Eliot said sharply, and she jumped. She’d somehow actually forgotten he was there. “Would you knock it off? Jesus—did you _really_ have to make a big dramatic reveal out of this?” With a growling sigh, he took off his sunglasses, lifted his head and shook his hair out of his face, and then finally met her gaze.

She remembered the first time she’d looked into Emilia’s eyes, so far dilated that they were irisless, nothing but all-consuming pupils set in white sclera. They’d made her think of a shark’s eyes: onyx black and featureless, alien, empty of humanity. Like voids, blank and hungry.

Eliot’s eyes were the same. Endlessly dark and unwavering, cold as stone.

“This is fake,” she heard her voice say, as if from a long distance. Her body had gone icy and slow, as if the air around her had turned to slush, paralyzing her with its frozen weight.

Eliot gave her a slow blink. Leaning farther forward onto the desk, he extended his arm to her, wrist turned upward. She stared at it, trying to drag her thoughts together. She knew what she was supposed to do, and she knew that she was terrified. But she had to confirm it. Confirm the diagnosis. Confirm the reality.

Taking a pair of nitrile gloves out of her purse, she pulled them on. The familiar snap centered her, bringing her back from the knife edge of hysteria. Gingerly she took up Eliot’s arm and pressed her fingers to the pulse point.

There it was: the slow, too slow beat. Like the rhythm of an ocean wave, roll and lull. She could feel the slight chill of his skin through the gloves, see the trace of cyanosis in his fingertips. It was all real. She drew back sharply.

Emilia would have lunged after her, gape-mouthed, moaning. Eliot remained motionless for a moment, then pulled back his arm. His face twisted into a sardonic smile before returning to what seemed to be a naturally forbidding expression.

She removed the gloves, then realized she didn’t have anywhere safe to dispose of them. She couldn’t just throw them randomly in the trash. Finally she stuffed them into her tampon holder. She’d sacrifice her purse if she had to. There was hand sanitizer in there too, and she applied it liberally.

The men had remained silent, probably awaiting her reaction. She realized she’d been holding her breath, as if that could protect her, and she exhaled shakily.

“I can’t believe...you...do you have _any_ idea how dangerous this is? How much risk you’re putting people in? We don’t think this is airborne, but we have so little information. We just don’t know anything for sure! And you’re here! At a—a _restaurant_!”

“Do you think I don’t know that? That’s why I’m not _in_ the pub.” Eliot’s resting face was already scary; his angry one sent her heart racing like a mouse on a wheel. “It’s not like I’m going around breathing on people or putting my hands on their food. I’m not that stupid.”

“Well, we did go shopping that time,” Hardison remarked.

“Shut up, Hardison.” Eliot glowered at the other man, though there was a defensive hunch to his shoulders. “That was necessary. You wouldn’t have known what to get.”

This was just getting worse. But instead of having a nervous breakdown over yet another potential catastrophe, she focused on trying to wrestle her thoughts into order. If she had answers, any answers, maybe she’d find some hope. “You were exposed...Saturday? How?”

“Blood spray across the face.” He said it so matter of factly. Oh god.

“And we’ve been around him since then,” Hardison added. “No sign of infection.”

“We don’t know the incubation time, or at what stage a person is most infectious,” she protested.

“I turned in something like five minutes,” Eliot said, and she stared at him. Even the quickest-acting viruses took a few days to show their effects. Could these symptoms be from some kind of neurotoxin instead, and the presence of the virus was just a coincidence? Or was this something so radically new that it broke all the rules of virology? They didn’t know the timeline between Emilia’s exposure and the start of her symptoms, but surely it had to have been longer than that?

“What?” Eliot said, and she realized she’d been gazing blankly at him, wrapped up in her thoughts. Refocusing, she looked into his eyes, and despite how inhumanly blank they appeared, she could somehow tell there was a mind in there, a keen awareness, focused and alert.

“You’re lucid. Emilia’s...not.” Different presentation? Different condition altogether?

“It’s the brains,” Hardison said, nodding sagely, and swear to god, she was going to throw him off a bridge if he kept stringing her along with cryptic statements.

“Brains,” she said flatly. “Do I want to know.”

“Well, it’s the whole zombie thing, right—”

“This is not a _zombie thing_ ,” she said through her teeth. She’d already had to have this discussion three separate times with people at the hospital. “Zombies are not a thing that exists.” A sudden, repulsive thought jolted her. “You haven’t been....”

“ _Sheep_ brains. I keep saying it’s not that weird!” Eliot sounded thoroughly exasperated, as though this was an argument he’d had before and was very done with. “You know, brains are eaten in cultures all around the world. France, Mexico, Vietnam.” He gave her a pointed look. “My _grandma_ used to make eggs and brains on toast.”

“Suddenly a lot of things about you make more sense,” Hardison said with a teasing glint in his eyes, and in return Eliot shot him a look that promised dire retribution.

All the ridiculousness of eating brains aside, their story just wasn’t adding up. “So, wait a second. You said you,” she wasn’t going to say _turned_ , “became symptomatic in about five minutes. While you were at AdVitam, am I right? I’m going to assume you didn’t just _happen_ to have any sheep brains with you.” She didn’t bother to keep the scorn out of her voice. “How did you get out?”

“Eliot just powered right on through it,” Hardison said, and there was that smirk again. “My man is just that badass.”

There were many bridges in Portland. In fact, the pub wasn’t all that far from the river.

“I used to be in the army. Special Forces,” Eliot said, and to her surprise she found that utterly believable. His voice was sober, and there was no hint of swagger in his attitude; it was simply a straightforward statement. “So I’ve had training and experience in resistance.”

“Res—”

“ _Resistance_?” Hardison exploded, cutting her off. “Like, wait, resistance to what, _torture_? Man, I _literally_ asked you flat out if you were suffering.”

“The mental part is what’s hard to deal with.” Eliot shrugged. “The pain part’s not that bad.”

“Not that—” Hardison dragged a hand down his face. “Wait, wait— _pain_? Oh my g—okay, look, on a scale of one to ten, with one being ‘la-di-da, I feel fine’ and ten being ‘lord have mercy, please let me die,’ how’re you feeling right now?” He jabbed a finger at Eliot. “And none of your macho bullshit.”

Eliot pursed his lips, brow wrinkling as he checked in with himself. “Four...ish? Maybe five. Six when it’s _really_ intense, but right now it ain’t so bad.”

“Yeah, okay, and add at least two points to all of that.” _Can you believe this guy?_ his expression said as he glanced at her, seeking solidarity.

So there _was_ pain. But then why had nothing worked on it? “What kind of pain?” Meredith asked.

“The hunger doesn’t stop. Doesn’t matter what I eat or how much. The brains keep me _here_ ,” Eliot tapped a finger against his temple, “but they don’t help with the rest of it.” Abruptly he froze, staring at her. “Is Emilia on painkillers?”

That question hung in a silence that was answer enough—and Eliot surged out of his chair, startling her with the sudden force of his movement, with Hardison jumping to his feet a split second after.

“I gotta get the—” Hardison gestured upward and then bolted for the stairs. Leaving her alone with Eliot and his coiled tension. With his infection, barely controlled, if at all. He looked at her, acknowledging her wide-eyed stare.

“We’re going there,” he said. He’d put his sunglasses back on; the dark lenses regarded her without expression. “You riding with us?”

“What...?” She was still flailing, unable to catch up.

“It’ll be quicker if you come. We’ll need access.” Already turning away, he strode out of the office just as Hardison came banging back down the stairs wearing a jacket, a messenger bag slung around him. He threw another jacket to Eliot, who shrugged it on as they headed for the exit door, and she found herself hurrying after them without really thinking about it, swept along in their wake.

They blew through the door and into what was apparently the actual brewery attached to the pub, a large industrial space filled with equipment. A blond woman wearing a dark suit and a tie was walking briskly toward them; she looked surprised when they appeared. “You’re done already?” she asked.

“We’re going to the hospital,” Eliot said as he passed her.

Without hesitation she pivoted, falling into step next to Hardison without so much as a glance at Meredith. “I’m coming too,” she said.

“Might be a lot of cops,” Hardison murmured.

“Still coming.”

They exited the building into a loading area and headed straight for a large gun-metal gray pickup truck. “Me and my long legs call shotgun,” Hardison said, breaking into a slight jog ahead of the rest of them. And before she knew it, she was in the back seat with the woman, and Eliot was swinging the truck out of its parking place.

“We’ll be there in fifteen,” he said as they pulled into the street. It had taken her just over twenty minutes, and she clutched at the door handle, expecting the worst. Glancing up, she saw Eliot’s sunglasses reflected in the rearview mirror, and though his eyes were hidden, she could tell he was looking at her. “You didn’t know she was in pain?”

“There’s no tool for pain detection. In nonverbal patients we can only go by physiological signs and behaviors, and hers could be from physical distress or neurological dysfunction or both. We haven’t figured it out yet.” Accelerating sharply, Eliot slipped through an intersection just as the light was shifting to red, cut between a streetcar and a commercial van, and swung back into the left lane, guiding the big truck with unexpected finesse. She reminded herself to breathe and went on, “We _did_ try pain medications at one point, but they didn’t seem to make her any more comfortable—she was still just as highly agitated and aggressive. She’s on a massive dose of sedatives now; it’s the only way we can manage her.”

Eliot’s fingers tapped a restless rhythm on the steering wheel as they caught the next green light and blew through it. “Hardison,” he said abruptly. “I want you to punch me.”

“Say what? I ain’t punching you—you’re driving!”

“Not in the head! Hit me in the arm or somewhere. Hard.”

“No way, man, why’re you always asking me to hit you—”

The woman leaned forward between the seats and socked Eliot’s upper arm with enough force to make him grunt. The truck swerved, but only slightly. “Did that hurt?” she asked with an almost clinical curiosity.

“No.” He gave an irritated huff. “Should’ve realized the other day after I fell that something wasn’t right. The painkillers don’t work because she’s not feeling any physical pain. This—the hunger—is something else.” Under his breath, he added, “ _Damn it_.”

“Hey, why’re you mad? In your job, I’d think feeling no pain would be a plus.” Hardison had taken a laptop out of his bag and was working on something at feverish speed, fingers flying and windows popping up all over his screen.

“Pain is useful. It tells you things about your body, like what you’re doing to it and where something’s going wrong.” That was surprisingly astute—or maybe not so surprising. She wondered if he’d learned it in the military. Or in whatever his presumably very physical job was. Did she want to know? Before she could think too much about it, the woman turned abruptly toward her, leaning uncomfortably close, leaving almost no personal space between them.

“I’m Parker,” she announced.

“I, uh...I’m Meredith?” The way Parker was scrutinizing her was profoundly unsettling. She felt like all her pieces were being taken apart, examined in minute detail, and then put back together a couple of inches to the left.

“The doctor.” Nodding, Parker sat back, giving her a little more space, and she breathed a soundless sigh of relief. “What’s the security like?”

“Security?”

“At the hospital.” _Catch up_ , Parker’s tone implied.

“There are the, uh, security guards—”

“Are they armed?”

Wait, what? “Uh...maybe? Look, why do you need to—”

“What about regular police?”

There was usually an officer or two standing guard near Emilia’s room, and she thought there might be a couple more elsewhere in the hospital, helping to keep the general public away from their wing. Though she couldn’t think why someone would _want_ to trespass in an isolation zone holding the index patient of an unknown infectious disease outbreak. Maybe an enterprising journalist looking for a scoop? Or...people like her present company. The thought that there might be others out there was distressing. “Yes...?”

“How many?”

She balked; the interrogation was getting to be way too much. “I don’t know!”

“You don’t know a lot,” Parker observed, glancing away from her as if bored.

“Ease up, baby.” Hardison chuckled, the sound affectionate and familiar. “Don’t freak the mundanes.”

Oh, look. There was a bridge. Maybe she could throw both of them off.

“Hmph. Good thing I spent the morning being Special Agent Hagen.” Parker smirked, folding her arms, and Hardison nodded.

“Yep, yep, cool, that works. Hey, Eliot, do you want to be a delivery guy or landscaper?”

“Whatever, man.” They’d left the city proper and were on the highway, flowing through the moderately heavy traffic as if the other cars were going at half speed, and it surprised her to realize that Eliot’s driving, though fast, didn’t terrify her. There were no sudden swerves or erratic speed changes; he drove with steady, focused control and an obvious awareness of where all the other vehicles around them were and what they were doing. It actually made her feel safe. The other two people in the car...much less so.

Speaking of which....

Leaning forward against her seat belt, she addressed Hardison, who compared to Parker seemed more or less normal. “Look, is all this, this _whatever_ you’re doing really necessary?”

“Yeah, what happened to playing it straight?” Eliot said. She thought that was mockery in his voice but wasn’t quite sure.

“COA—covering our asses,” Hardison said. “We need some story other than ‘oh, hey, we broke into your hot zone, our bad.’ ” A small box plugged into his laptop whirred and spat out a laminated ID card. “Okay, Eliot, you’re Shaun Mason, landscaper, had a run-in with our girl Emilia in the early morning after she turned, didn’t think much of it other than ‘oookay, that’s some crazy business there, y’all’ until symptoms set in. When the news broke, you reported yourself, and FBI Special Agent Hagen’s accompanying you and the good doctor here to the hospital for a consult.”

He’d just forged an ID. _Forged_. In a truck in the middle of the highway. She looked sidelong at Parker, who had put on a pair of dark glasses and a threateningly neutral expression.

“We’re almost there,” Eliot said. “Parker, give it back.”

“Give what back?” Parker asked.

“Whatever it was you took.”

With a huff of annoyance, Parker handed over to Meredith...her own wallet and car keys.

This....

What....

“Who _are_ you people?” she half screamed, because this whole thing was just ridiculous and insane.

“Don’t worry, ma’am, we’re here to help,” Parker said, deadpan, and Hardison laughed.

She was still vibrating with confusion and rage when they reached the isolation unit’s floor, but as soon as the elevator door opened, the worst edge came off her stress. Everything was familiar—this was her territory, she knew how things worked, and if she didn’t like something they did, she was entirely within her authority to have them removed. (She tried not to think too hard about whether security would actually be _able_ to remove them.)

As they came around the corner of the nurses’ station, they met Kenneth on his way to the elevator. His exhaustion visibly weighed on him; his shoulders slumped as if his worn leather jacket was too heavy, and when he looked up at them with surprise, his eyes were red but dry, long cried out.

“Kenneth,” she acknowledged him. “Are you going home?” He nodded. “Good. Get some rest.” Should she give him any hope that there might be progress soon, or at least some better understanding of what they were facing? Before she could decide, Hardison stepped forward.

“Hey, man.” He caught Kenneth’s hand, pulled him into a one-armed hug that the other man sagged into, drooping with relief. “Told you we’re still on this,” he murmured. “Stay strong.” Kenneth mumbled something in reply that she couldn’t quite make out.

“We’ll get them,” Parker said, curt and quiet, an unexpected steel in her voice that made her seem very different from the woman in the car. When Kenneth released Hardison, she gripped his arm, gave it a hard, slightly awkward squeeze. “The people who did this—we’re going to make them pay.” Eliot just looked on, saying nothing, hands tucked in his pockets. He dipped his head in a short nod when Kenneth glanced at him, but his attention seemed elsewhere. As they separated, he was already glancing down the hall, toward the plastic sheeting curtaining off the very end.

The security guard posted outside the isolation zone went attentive as they approached, then relaxed at the sight of her, obviously assuming that her companions were allowed to be there. Technically she should probably have cleared this with someone—the safety department, the rest of the response team, the police or FBI, maybe everyone involved—but it would have bogged them down in questions and whatever opportunity they had here might be lost. She hoped she wasn’t going to regret that maverick decision.

“Special Agent Hagen, FBI,” Parker was saying, and it was almost no surprise to see her flashing a badge at the guard. He went deferential at once. So there was some additional legitimacy. Even if it was entirely fake.

“Sir!” It was Micah, one of the two nurses on watch duty, and she realized that Eliot had already pushed through the sheeting. She hurried after him, catching up outside the window onto Emilia’s room. The lights inside were kept dim, and her bed was a pale island in that twilight, the readouts on the machines surrounding it winking in vivid colors. Aside from those, the IV stand, and a rolling tray table pushed up against a wall, the room was empty.

Emilia lay propped up in the bed. Under the restraint straps, her chest rose and fell in painfully slow rhythm; sometimes her hands opened and closed, fingers crawling against the bed sheets, or her head lolled to one side or the other. Other than that, she was entirely still and, except for the occasional low groan, silent. Her black eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking.

“Sir, you can’t—!” Micah was a little taller and broader than Eliot, but also softer, and they were clearly panicking over how to deal with this rough-looking stranger. They hovered, trying to block the way but too hesitant to actually reach out and grab Eliot as the man pushed past them and opened the door.

“Wait—!” Meredith lunged, but Eliot was already inside the room. “Don’t go in there,” she snapped, much too late. He ignored her, instead approaching the bed.

As he crossed Emilia’s line of view, her head turned, her gaze tracking him, but she remained quiet. Meredith held her breath, waiting for the inevitable eruption. Emilia had gotten weaker, and the sedatives muted her reactions, but she still greeted every approach with a struggle, punctuated by moaning cries.

It didn’t come. Eliot reached the bedside and bent over her. “Hey, sweetheart,” he murmured. He’d taken off the hat he’d donned when they’d reached the hospital; now he pushed the sunglasses up on his head, and his smile as he looked down at her transformed his entire face, made it unexpectedly boyish and charming. “How you doing?” She stared up at him, and her mouth moved silently. “It’s rough, I know.” Reaching down, he stroked her lank curls. A low sound escaped her then, and she tilted her head into his touch, her eyes closing.

“She’s—she’s not—” Micah stammered.

“She’s not reacting violently to him.” Shock had blanked Meredith’s mind; she forced her way through it. “The virus, it—they— _recognize_ each other, somehow?” She couldn’t conceive of how it could be possible, but very little of this seemed possible, so never mind that. Focus on the _what_ first; worry about _how_ and _why_ later, probably in another endless conference call.

“Hey,” Eliot said. Refocusing, she met his gaze. “Can I get some ice chips in here?” She nodded, slightly surprised, then jerked her chin in answer to Micah’s unspoken question, and they took off, brushing through the containment curtain with a sharp _fwick_ and rustle of plastic. Hardison caught the sheeting before it fell closed again.

“Can we...?” he asked, hesitant.

“As far as the window,” she said. “No farther.” Hardison and Parker eased nearer—no reckless charging in here, at least—and joined her in watching as Eliot murmured to Emilia, too quietly for her to make out more than occasional words. Hardison exhaled softly.

“She still hasn’t said anything, right?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Damn. Wish she could tell us what she knows.”

That, and—“I wish she could tell us what she _needs_ ,” she said.

Micah returned with the ice chips, and Eliot met them at the door to take the cup. As he slipped the first sliver between Emilia’s cracked lips, she whimpered, and Meredith had to close her eyes against the painful twist of sympathy. Only with the heaviest sedation had they been able to so much as touch Emilia’s face; if there was nothing else that they could get from these people, she could be grateful for this much. Despite the urgency of the case and the press of her need to know, she let Eliot take as much time as he wanted; meanwhile, she started framing her report to the team, trying to arrange what facts she had in some kind of sensible order and make a plan for what to do next.

When Eliot finally left the room, his expression had turned darkly brooding again, but she noticed a subtle difference, an unexpected openness as he raised his eyes, narrowed against the light, to meet hers.

“Whatever I can do to help,” he said, “if there are questions you want to ask or tests you want to run, I’ll do it. But I’ve got some conditions.” He waited for her nod of acknowledgment, then held up a finger. “Number one, no publicity. My real name and face don’t appear _anywhere_.” His voice and gaze flared with fierce intensity; he stared hard at her until she nodded again. “Nothing that puts me unconscious. And my people stay with me the whole time.”

The conditions were more than acceptable; in fact, she’d consider herself lucky. “Agreed,” she said promptly. “First things first, we’ll need to take your clothes.” She couldn’t help a smirk at his startled double take. She honestly had to admit that she’d been waiting to say that. “You’ve just spent time in a potentially infectious isolation area with no protective equipment; everything you’re wearing has to be considered contaminated.” Pointing to the patient room across the hall, which they’d been using as a changing and decontamination station, she said, “Strip. And shower. And wash your hands before you touch anything! We’ll get you some scrubs.”

“You heard the lady,” Hardison said, snickering. Eliot’s face twisted up into something legitimately terrifying—

“Do you need any help?” Parker asked with every appearance of innocence.

—and he dissolved into sputtering incoherence. “No! No, I don’t n— This is my favorite jacket,” he snarled as he turned and stomped toward the changing room. “ _I’d better get it back._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Shaun Mason" is a character from Mira Grant's excellent Newsflesh series. (I see Hardison as more of a media/gaming fan than a book fan, so this might be an unlikely reference for him, but who knows, in this universe maybe someone's optioned her books for movies. Heck, I think somebody should do that in *our* universe.) Shaun goes into dangerous places and provokes zombies for blog ratings. He also gets extremely angry and then punches people a lot.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I missed Tuesday...so you'll get two chapters today!

Hardison and Eliot were doing their not-arguing thing. It was fond and familiar, just the way a home ought to be (or at least, home as she understood it now, which was far better than any of the supposed-to-be-homes she’d had before), and it wrapped her in safe feelings, like a twice-checked harness. Kneeling comfortably on the couch, with her arms draped over the back, she watched her boys bat words back and forth like two cats with a toy.

“—and you know something else I really hate? Those flimsy examination gowns. You ever tried to fight off a Brazilian death squad with your ass hanging out?”

“Nope, can’t say that I have.” Hardison was smiling, his focus split about seventy-thirty between the invisible world inside his computer and their conversation.

“That was a rhetorical question. I already know you’ve never in your life fought off any kind of death squad.” Eliot pressed a button on the blender; the grinding whir sounded angry but probably wasn’t, just like Eliot. (Actually, she was more certain about Eliot than the blender.)

Hardison came a little farther out of his hackerspace to retort, “Y’never know, man, I could have mysteries, secrets in my past. Maybe I was a death-squad-fighting secret agent in my younger days.”

“What, when you were twelve?” Switching off the blender, Eliot poured something thick and red and fruity looking into a glass, and then began running water into the sink.

“Oh, yeah, because you _so old_ , man,” Hardison shot back, laughing. “Want me to set up you with AARP? Get you on Medicare? ’Cause you gonna be needing a wheelchair soon, I bet.”

“Could still whup your ass from a wheelchair.”

Sometimes she tried to decide which smile was the greatest score: Hardison’s, which came and went so easily, so often, flashing out like refracted sunlight; or Eliot’s—his real smile, slow, sometimes sly, and always a little secret, even when he was relaxed and easy with them, like this. An endless abundance of riches or something heavily guarded and rare.

It was good that she never actually needed to pick which one was best. And even better that she didn’t need to choose just one to own.

Eliot’s smile lingered, faint and faded but as comfortably soft as old, well-worn bills as he came around the kitchen island with his drink. Hardison glanced over and did a dramatic double take. “Is that...a _brain smoothie_?”

“Yeah. With blueberries and pomegranate juice, got some chia seeds in there—”

Hardison looked so absolutely horrified that it was hilarious. She buried her snerk of laughter in the couch cushions so as not to distract from the moment. “Dear _lord_ , please tell me you rinsed the Vitamix out good before it went in the dishwasher.”

Eliot rolled his eyes. “ _Yes_ , I rinsed it out,” he said. Then he faltered. “But I think...I better get a separate one. Maybe a whole extra set of utensils.” His voice had gone heavy in a way it shouldn’t when he was talking about food things, and as a sudden realization hit her, an unexpected grief surprised her with its sting.

“Are you never going to cook for us again?” she asked.

He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “It’s too much risk. I’m not going to take the chance.”

The thought was appalling. And it wasn’t the only awful one that had just occurred to her. “No more sex?” He didn’t say anything. “Not even kissing?”

“If I gave you this thing...I couldn’t ever forgive myself.” Those ragged words hurt like star trails ripping streaks in the sky, and how much worse did it have to be for him, the one who was falling? She wanted to catch him but didn’t know how.

“People with HIV can have sex,” Hardison said quietly. He’d turned away from his computers and was swiveling his chair a little one way, then a little the other, as he studied Eliot, narrow eyed. “Y’know, it’s called ‘safe sex’; maybe you’ve heard of it.”

“And they _know_ how HIV is transmitted,” Eliot fired back. “And they _know_ that with the right combo of drugs they can live for years, maybe even their whole lives, without developing full-blown AIDS. With this, we just don’t know. We don’t know _anything_.” His voice dropped, the sharpness going out of it and leaving just the sad. “And it’s called ‘saf _er_ sex.’ There’s always a risk.”

“ ‘Don’t know’ don’t mean ‘never know,’ ” Hardison said, low and strong. “Someday, we’ll have answers, I guarantee. Meantime, we’re here, and we love you, man. Just let’s think of this as temporary, okay?” His smile crept out, stealthy and just a tiny bit wicked. “And hey, ingenuity always finds a way. I got this remote-control vibrating butt plug I been meaning to try out—”

“What—are you shitting me? You’re gonna use that on—no!” Eliot was clearly having too many feelings, because usually he kept up the façade of outraged anger, but this time a smile escaped him. It wavered, settled into something quiet and...she didn’t know. Too sad to be happy, too happy to be sad.

Lowering his eyes, he hesitated, then put down his smoothie and did a thing with his hands. It was like two OK signs, but with all the fingers down and the Os flattened. He touched his fingertips together, then glanced up to see their unspoken questions.

“It’s ASL—American Sign Language. I dated a girl for a while whose brother was deaf.” He was maybe blushing, just a little. “It means ‘kiss.’ ”

Blowing kisses always looked weird and stupid and fake. This was nice. She echoed the gesture, watching him watching her, the play of expression on his face as Hardison mimicked it too. Eliot ducked his head again, cleared his throat—then straightened, shook out his hair, and grabbed his smoothie.

“So, uh—you wanna watch—” He gestured with his glass toward the TV and whatever it was that might be there to be watched.

“Sure thing.” Hardison kicked himself upright and out of his chair. “I’m ’a sit on the other end of the couch, though, away from your nightmare-fuel beverage. I mean, really? Pomegranate and _brains_?”

Now it was Eliot who had the wicked glint in his eyes. “It’s actually not that bad. Want to try it?”

Hardison backpedaled—sidepedaled?—away from Eliot, his arms crossing into an X between them. “No! Nuh-uh. _Nope_.”

“C’mon, just a taste.”

“ _No!_ ”

Grinning, Parker flipped around to face the TV and laid claim to the remote so she could start scrolling through their options.

Her boys were so funny. They were the best.

* * *

He wore the scrubs from the start, this time, and a protective gown over them. There’d been an argument over the rest of the gear, but he’d held firm. Wasn’t like _he_ needed to worry about catching anything, and the shower was right across the hall for cleanup afterward. He was supposed to be keeping Emilia calm, and that wanted a face, the touch of hands skin to skin—not cold gloves or the full kit of face shield, respirator mask, and hood that made the others look like something out of a sci-fi horror movie, the kind of movie he’d’ve been perfectly happy not living in. Fighting zombies or alien spawn or whatever at least had the potential to be cool, even if on the ground it was actually more likely to be an ugly mess. Being on the medical side of things? Not cool at all.

Emilia stirred at the sounds outside the room: footsteps, rolling equipment. They’d ramped down the sedatives and put her back on a painkiller, just in case that helped, but aside from being more alert she didn’t seem all that different. The day before, after all his testing was over, he’d gone back to talk to her some more, had sung to her a little, quiet, just between the two of them. He thought she’d heard, even responded with tiny eye flickers and changes of expression, but maybe that was just wishful thinking. This morning she’d looked at him like she recognized him, and she’d gripped his hand when he put it over hers, but she still didn’t speak, didn’t answer when he spoke. There was no way to tell what of her was still in there, how much she understood of what was happening, or whether she’d ever find her way back out of that emptiness.

He’d been there. He knew how far lost you could get. And he’d had a tether and the fierce, honed will to follow it home, and still it had been _hard_.

(And would she be glad to come back, if it meant waking up to the pain of the hunger? Or would it kinder to leave her how she was, or even to give her some other, more merciful end? But if there was a choice to make, it should be hers, and hers alone. Best he could do was help give her a chance to make that choice.)

Emilia shifted again, restless and groaning, and he bent over her, glad he’d taken time to tie his hair back out of his face. “Easy, darlin’,” he murmured. “The doctor just wants to take a look at you. Think you can let her do that?” The plan was for the doctor to try examining her again, this time with his help, since she didn’t react to him the way she did the others. If it went well, they’d take a shot at getting a conscious EEC reading, see what was misfiring inside her head. If not, the next step was to get some of the brain soup he’d made into her, see if it did for her what it had done for him, and _then_ try. Personally he thought they should’ve just gone straight for the soup, but there had been arguments over that too—something-something science, controlling all the variables, and then somebody had taken the soup away to test it. (Seriously? Test it for _what?_ ) If they didn’t bring it back, he was going to track down the whole team of experts who were calling the shots and punch them all in their asshole faces.

The doctor and nurses came in finally, just as he was getting impatient as well as pissed off by all the bullshit. And with them the prickling returned, which wasn’t much helping his mood. Over the last day or so he’d been taking measure of all the changes in himself, because if he wanted to do his job right he had to know exactly what he was capable of. Like he’d told Hardison, not being able to feel physical pain was concerning, but he could work with that. Less good, his reaction time was slower, and his body felt indefinably _off_ , but either it was gradually getting better or he was starting to adjust for it. Stamina seemed fine. His sense of smell was definitely jacked way up; same with his night vision, though he had trouble with light now. (The doctor had warned him to keep wearing sunglasses as much as possible in the daytime or else risk permanent damage to his eyes, especially with no pain to warn him.) His other senses were about normal, maybe a little dulled, but he could deal with it.

But this thing...he didn’t have it figured yet. It didn’t hurt, but it was strange. Sometimes it was intense and other times it was near imperceptible, but all he could tell for sure was that it had something to do with people. Nothing else seemed to trigger it—only being around them. And with Emilia, the sensation was different in a way that was hard to put into words. Like a...a photo negative. Pull instead of push. An inverted signal. Trying to articulate it hurt his head worse than listening to Hardison’s endless tech blather.

But he was dead certain Emilia was feeling it too—she’d let go of his hand, her wrists tensing, twisting against the restraints as her gaze swung from one person to another. It locked onto Dr. Tran as she approached on the other side of the bed.

“Emilia, can you hear me?” the doctor said, slightly muffled behind the respirator mask. “Can you understand what I’m saying?” When Emilia didn’t answer, she glanced at Eliot, but he didn’t have an answer for her either. Because... _damn_.

The buzz was strong. Stronger than it’d ever been, except for that one time with Hardison, when he’d been under and gone. It was strong enough that he could make out subtle flickers and realize how they echoed the doctor’s movements. And just like that it slotted into place, and he got it.

Some kind of hunter sense. A consciousness of _prey_. How Emilia knew he was like her, and not something to attack.

And that wasn’t the only sense dragging at his attention. Even with all the odors of plastic and synthetics, disinfectant, the unmistakable smell of hospital, the human scents still came through thick and distinct. He’d smelled the reek of fear before, but up close, not from several feet away, let alone across a room. Dr. Tran and one of the nurses were tense and alert, but the other nurse was flat out scared. He and Emilia were surrounded by people whose adrenaline was crackling, whose heartbeats were echoed in pulses of electric energy, who smelled like sweat and salt and _meat_.

Emilia’s groan took on a higher, keening pitch, and her body arched off the bed, straining against the straps holding her down.

“This ain’t gonna work,” he growled, but he leaned over her anyway, pressing her shoulders down against the mattress. “C’mon, Emilia, listen to me, _look_ at me.” She was going to hurt herself if she didn’t stop fighting the restraints. “Easy. E...ea...sy....”

_...slide._

_He was sliding. Into._

_Not. Not-one._

_—black twist into black-noise static and and and—_

_—burn._

_NEED._

_N...EE...D..._

_...nn...aaa..._

_...._

* * *

Parker saw it go wrong. Saw the moment Eliot’s lips stopped moving and the tension seeped out of his face, leaving it drained and empty. The way his weight shifted as he let up the pressure on Emilia’s shoulders. She was drawing breath, half a second from shouting, when he lunged across the bed and grabbed the doctor by one arm.

“ _Eliot!_ ” She slammed her palm against the window; he didn’t react. The nurses screamed—the tubby one scrambled around the foot of the bed to clutch at Eliot, which was braver than expected but also _stupid_. Releasing the doctor, Eliot slammed the nurse against the side of the bed, wrenched their arm around into a hammerlock, and bent them forward over the rail.

She started for the door, and one of the masked orderlies blocked her way. “Miss—Agent—”

“ _Move!_ ” They did not have _time_ for this. Eliot had ripped the nurse’s hood off; they were red faced and howling. The doctor snatched a syringe off a tray and launched herself right over the bed—Eliot blocked her arm, sending the syringe flying, grabbed her by the front of her gown and threw her backward. She was tiny and Eliot was strong, so she got some impressive air time before she hit the floor and skidded into the wall.

“Get some help in here!” the other nurse yelled, diving to her rescue, and two of the orderlies were inside the room finally, charging at Eliot. And that went exactly as one would expect. Eliot had fought better—he was strangely slow and uncoordinated—but these guys were pathetic. He slung the nurse into one of them, sending both sprawling, then turned to punch the other guy—one, two—knocked him into the machines next to the bed, sending them crashing against each other, alarms shrieking—and three—cracked his head against the bed rail. All the time Emilia was screaming.

Parker shoved a couple of gawkers out of the way and strode into the room. “ _Eliot!_ ” she shouted again. This time, with nothing between them, she caught his attention; he turned her way, though his eyes didn’t seem to focus on her. Dead black, it was hard to tell. “Look at me!” she snapped, putting the whip crack of an order in it ( _she was his mastermind, he was her hitter_ ). She jabbed two fingers at him, and then at her own face. “ _Eyes on me!_ ”

There—the shift of stance as he collected himself. He saw her.

Did he know her?

Maybe...?

And then the other orderly, the one he’d shoved the nurse into, got up and punched him in the stomach.

 _For fuck’s sake!_ If the syringe hadn’t broken, she’d have stabbed that guy in the ass with it.

Eliot caught the second punch, then kicked the man’s leg out from under him, sending him crashing down onto the floor again. Shaking his head as if dazed, even though it hadn’t been a very good hit, he staggered a couple of steps, out of the man’s reach. And when he caught his balance and turned to her again, that was _Eliot_ , absolutely. His face and eyes were alive. But—still not right. He recognized her, but he was confused. Scared, as he looked at the fallen bodies all around him.

There were too many people, and everything was too loud, with the shouting and the screaming and the machines’ alarms going off. They had to get out. Before she could say or even signal anything, Eliot was stumbling toward her. She caught him as he half fell and let him lean on her as they exited the room. She didn’t know who all these observers standing around in the hall were, but the only thing that mattered was that they were getting out of her way. She found a clear spot of wall and got Eliot propped up against it. He was hunched over, shivering. “Eliot. What happened?”

“In my head,” he gritted out. His hands fisted in his hair, the knuckles white with strain. “She’s...she was... _inside my head_.”

 _Out. Out. Out._ Forget the job. It didn’t matter that Emilia was a client. _No one_ was going to take their Eliot like that. She dragged him away from the wall, away from that room where Emilia was still screaming. Eliot whined through clenched teeth, a thin, high-pitched sound she’d never heard him make before. It terrified her. But still, he came where she led. They thrashed their way through the gap in the plastic sheeting and out into the main hallway, where Eliot stopped, squeezing his eyes shut against the brighter lights.

The hospital security person standing on watch—she didn’t remember his name, whatever, she’d just think of him as Mark—was walking toward them. “Hey! What’s going on in there? Do they need some more help?”

“ _Back off!_ ” she snarled. Couldn’t let him get within reach while Eliot was still struggling to adjust. And _stupid_ —everyone here was so stupid, didn’t he hear the screaming? “And _yes_ , they need help, get in there! Go, move it!”

 _What, me?_ he mouthed, wide eyed, pointing at the end of the hall and then himself, but he started sidling toward it—just as one of the nurses flung the curtain aside. “Stop them!” the woman snapped, her voice cracking, her cap and mask all askew.

And footsteps came clattering toward them from the other direction—two men in suits jogging down the hall. “Stop! Hold it right there! FBI!”

Mark the Security Guy looked from them to her and then back. “But... _she’s_ FBI?”

And—they were done.

She gave the FBI men just enough time to get within range, then kicked the foot brake off an IV stand and slung it at them. It only blocked one, but when he fell into it he tripped the other man, who stumbled, trying to catch his balance. Three extra seconds for her.

Mark the Very, Very Dumb Security Guy had a taser holstered at his hip—now she had a taser. A hard elbow to the sternum sent him reeling backward; his head clonked into the wall, and that took care of him for the moment. The taser was the kind that shot out barbs, which wasn’t her favorite, but she’d cope. Electricity surged along its wires into the second FBI man’s chest, and he danced like a puppet on strings before he dropped. As the first man recovered and came at them, Eliot surged past her, rammed his fist into the man’s solar plexus, once and again, brought his elbow down on the back of the man’s neck, and he went down as well. She caught up to Eliot, yanked on his arm, and they ran.

Down the hall, around a corner, and another one as she tracked the hospital’s floor plan in her mind. Here—the corridor was briefly empty. Shoving Eliot at a storage closet, she sprinted a few yards farther, hit the big button for an automatic door on the other side of the hall, then sprang back toward the closet as the heavy double doors slowly began to open. Slipping inside the closet, she eased its door shut, smooth and fast but not too fast, not so abrupt as to catch the eye. Running footsteps drummed outside, getting louder, and she pressed Eliot further back, tucked them both in between two racks of shelves, holding him near. Two people out there, she thought, a familiar _thwap-thwap_ of hard-soled shoes, so the agent she’d zapped was probably back on his feet.

Honestly, legal tasers just did _not_ generate enough current.

“There, through there!” one of the men shouted—there was a bang as someone tried to force their way through the still-opening automatic doors, and then the footsteps dribbled away into the distance.

They had two minutes, three tops, before the agents realized that they’d lost them and backtracked or called in support. But she spent precious seconds lingering, gripping the solid muscles of Eliot’s biceps, reassuring herself that he was there, he was with her, he was hers, and that he was really, truly going to be all right.

* * *

He hadn’t been so shaken in...a while. Last thing that’d come close was that time they’d pulled Hardison out of the ground. And the thought that he might be dragged under like that again, down into that mindless need....

But they were out of there, safe; he couldn’t feel the blackout crawling inside his head, the undertow of shared hunger. And he didn’t think he’d hurt anyone seriously, but most of it he couldn’t recall properly. He’d have to ask Parker about it later.

Parker had saved him. Gotten him out. She was right up close to him, inches away, her hair stirring as he breathed, her hands strong on his arms. He could feel the hum of her body, the pulse of her heart; her scent was sharp and fiery with fear, but the fear was fading. Because it wasn’t _him_ she was frightened of.

She should be. And they shouldn’t be standing so close. He was _breathing_ on her, for christ’s sake, practically in her face. He swayed back, and her gaze snapped up to meet his, her grip tightening. Her eyes were clear and steely. Determined.

She let go with one hand to tap her comm. “Hardison, get out,” she muttered. “We’re blown.” Then she reached up to put her arms around his neck.

He started to recoil. “Parker—” No, her fingers were working at the gown’s ties, he realized, and he fumbled behind his back for the lower ones. She peeled the gown off him, leaving him in just the scrubs, then grabbed a surgical cap off a shelf and helped him tuck his hair up under it.

“They’re looking for _two_ people,” she murmured as they worked. “Just a minute—” to Hardison, and then, “Got your escape route ready?”

“Yeah.” Of course he had a route picked. First thing you did going into a place was map all the possible ways to get out. And he got why they were splitting up. But she didn’t know for sure how well he was functioning, so she was walking him through it. Good call.

She handed him a mask, and he pulled it on, adjusted the fit. “You can lift a badge?”

“I got it. I’m okay.” She studied him for a moment, then nodded. Reaching up, she tucked his com into his ear and turned it on; he could hear Hardison muttering to himself, low and anxious.

She rocked back, putting a little more space between them. “Boost me,” she said. Crouching, he wrapped his arms around her legs and lifted her, held her there as she slid a panel aside and pulled herself up into the drop ceiling.

As she disappeared, his heart caught, what would have been a stutter and was now just a single, sharp throb. He tugged down his mask. “Parker!” he hissed. Popping back into view, she peered down at him, and he hesitated. _Love you_ , he mouthed at last, and her eyes went wide, startled. Then she smiled, dazzling, signed _kiss_ at him, and vanished, the panel dropping back into place behind her.

He didn’t usually come right out and say it. He let his actions speak for him, and they knew that, were comfortable with it. But he’d lost his words for a while there, and....

Maybe there were things he ought to say more often.

Shaking out his tension, he pulled the mask back up and moved to the door. He cracked it open—all was quiet, and he left the closet, turning back the way they’d come and walking casually toward the more trafficked areas, keeping his eyes down and trying not to squint too obviously against the overheads’ glare.

At heart, the fight and the grift weren’t so different. There were certain principles they held in common. Stay loose. React in the moment, without thinking too deep or long. (Which was where Hardison had trouble; that man overthought and overcomplicated everything. He could talk for hours about the back story of a new game character, from the history of their family to what they’d for lunch, only to spend whole sessions just killing orcs and whatever.)

And never doubt. Of course he belonged here. Just another employee. A brush past a distracted orderly got him a badge; he took a wheelchair parked against a wall and rolled it toward the elevator. There were people rushing around, announcements, a handful of LEOs saying _you look here, you look there_. He acted vaguely startled, got out of their way, didn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

Another guy, a nurse, was in the elevator when he got on. As they stood side by side, he could feel the man’s curious attention on him. It was probably the mask. Turning aside, he coughed into the crook of his elbow, then sniffled.

“Got a cold?” the man asked.

“Yeah.” He did his best to sound congested. “I was going to stay home today, but.” He shrugged.

The man chuckled with dry, knowing humor. “I hear you. You guys are short-staffed too, huh?”

“Mmn.”

They reached the ground floor, and the man strode out first, raising his hand in a half wave. “Feel better, man.”

“Thanks.” He took the other direction, down a sloping corridor and into a large room full of chairs, over half of them occupied by people in various states of misery.

“ _Where are you?_ ” Parker asked, tense.

“ER.” He left the wheelchair outside Triage and walked out through the automatic glass doors. No one looked twice at him. Once he crossed the ambulance lane and reached the road, he pulled off the cap and mask—they were more out of place and noticeable outdoors.

Hardison’s white sedan drew up in front of him.

“Stop!” someone yelled.

He didn’t pause or look back but slid straight into the rear seat, and Hardison took off. He did glance behind them then, caught a glimpse of dark suits—FBI for sure. Parker handed a pair of sunglasses to him over her shoulder; he put them on with relief at finally being able to see normally again. If not for the Portland-typical cloud cover, he’d’ve been basically blind out there.

“Okay, someone gonna fill me in?” Hardison asked. He sped north, checking the rearview mirror a couple of times for a pursuit that hadn’t appeared yet, then turned off the main road to lose them in the grid of small suburban streets. “Why’re we booking it?”

“We’ll fill you in later,” Parker said. “For now, just drive.”

Closing his eyes, Eliot relaxed and sat back, trusting Hardison to find a safe place for them to regroup. And also, at some point, some pants. If he was going to be running from the law yet again, he wanted to be wearing actual clothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's more than one way to sign "kiss" in ASL, and I confess that I picked one that I liked the look of. If I managed to choose something inappropriate or just plain wrong, someone please let me know and point me at a better version; I'll edit the story to fix it.


	6. Chapter 6

“Hi, Amy! It’s Parker!” Parker’s voice was bright and fake with an extra layer of fake on top of that. “How’re things at the pub? Everything quiet?” Alec glanced over at her as she paced, the arm not holding the phone wrapped tight across her chest, hand tucked into her armpit. “Good! Great! Listen, Eliot wanted me to ask you to keep an eye on the inventory today, okay? If it looks like we’re going to run out of...stuff, let me know.”

It was all code, of course. Parker calling on his phone. Name-checking Eliot. Talking about inventory. They tried not to involve Amy in _too_ much of their work, but not going to lie, it was a help to have an extra set of eyes watching out for trouble.

“Cool, cool. Okay, thanks. Byeee!” Parker hung up. “She says nothing’s going on there.” Despite the good news, she sounded tense and grim. Handing Alec’s phone back, she hopped up to crouch on the park bench next to him, hands twisting around each other as she stared into the distance.

“Thanks, babe.” They had some breathing space to plan, at least. Once they’d been sure they’d gotten away clean, they’d crossed the river and tucked the car into a parking spot under the bridge’s off-ramp, near a not-too-traveled part of the waterfront park. (After a brief stop along the way to buy—ahem, _acquire_ —a change of clothes for Eliot. Parker had even managed to find a jacket very similar to the one that had been lost to the hospital’s decon protocols.) No reason for anyone to come looking for them in this particular place.

Which gave them a little time to process and decide what to do next. Parker and Eliot had given him a terse account of what had happened—that apparently Emilia had caught Eliot up in some kind of zombie mind meld (which— _what?_ how was that even a thing?), there’d been a set-to that ended with the two of them having to bolt, and now some unknown number of people were in on the fact that Eliot was running around Portland all free and contagious. That was definitely a priority: to find out how far the info had spread and what links people had already drawn. Bringing up his newsfeed and the relevant saved search, he scrolled through the list of keywords, seeing what, if anything, he should add before letting it run.

“Are we going to have to burn the pub?” Startled, he glanced up at Parker again. It took a moment of internal questioning before he decided that Parker hadn’t meant it literally.

“I hope not,” he said. _Damn._ It’d been hard enough losing their first office, and then leaving Nate’s apartment, and now this—each headquarters more like home than the last one.

“That’s the problem with being settled.” Eliot stood with his arms braced on the railing, looking out over the Willamette, the bridge’s lift towers rising beyond him, a boxy lattice of dark steel struts. The breeze played with his hair like Parker did sometimes, fingering through the loose strands and letting them fall. “It means you’ve got something to lose.”

“Now, we don’t know—they might not—”

“You gave her your real name.” Eliot turned to face him, leaning back against the rail. The shades blocked the force of his glower, but the harsh edge to his voice came through plenty clear. “You met her at the pub. What were you thinking, man?”

“We’ve met plenty of clients at the pub,” he protested.

“She ain’t a client!”

“She might as well be! Look, we were _helping_ her—”

“We stole her,” Parker broke in. “We don’t steal clients. They choose us.”

He’d lost this argument before he’d even begun it, but he wasn’t going to let it go. “We did her a solid. And y’know what, she could’ve called the authorities on us at any time, but she didn’t. She let us do the thing on our own terms. So why would she turn on us now?”

“I dunno, aside from the fact that I—” A pair of neon-clad joggers trotted down the path between them, and Eliot bit down on his words until they’d passed, then growled, more quietly, “—that I apparently lost all control and attacked people and _chucked her across the room_? —You’re sure I didn’t infect anyone?”

“Pretty sure,” Parker said. “You didn’t bite anyone, and there wasn’t any blood.”

Eliot gave a tight nod, then turned his attention back to Alec. “And then we ran.”

“You didn’t have to run. The Hagen alias was rock solid.” He’d worked hard on developing that one and keeping it current; it had been one of their most useful long-running ones, and losing it really sucked. “You could’ve bluffed your way through it.”

“No, we couldn’t,” Parker snapped. “You weren’t there, so you don’t know what it was like. We had to _go_.”

Eliot added, “Walk me through this, man, ’cause I ain’t following your thought process here. I _proved_ myself a danger in front of a bunch of people. And now you want to rely on this doctor, who we _don’t even know_ , to stand by us and not tell everything she knows to the Feds? ’Cause they’re going to be after her, you know that—she and all the assistants she was working with knew I had the virus and didn’t report it. You think she’s not going to save herself? Why are you so hot to trust her?”

“I’m not—it’s just—” Groaning out a sigh, he surrendered, slumping back against the bench. “Okay, it was stupid of me to be that open. I admit it, all right? But look, I figured we weren’t going to be committing any crimes for this—except there was the whole trespassing thing, but that was before, it don’t count.” He hesitated. “And also the impersonating of a federal agent...and I guess the other fake ID too. But that was improvisation. Spur of the moment. It don’t count either.” God, they were the worst ever at not being criminals. It was like that was their way of life or something. He shook his head. “Guess I thought that, if we were all on the same team, pulling for the same goal, we’d just be working together like regular people.”

“We don’t do ‘regular people,’ ” Parker said, flat as a locked door. “That’s not who we are.”

He knew that. He truly did. And whatever the consequences were, they were all on him. With a dull, shamed ache in his heart, he looked away, down at his phone, and he remembered that there were useful and important things he ought to be doing. He thumbed the search button.

“I say we burn it,” Eliot said, and you’d never know how much he loved the pub, or how many great memories that apartment held for them, from his expressionless face and voice.

“Now,” Parker agreed. “Fast. We need to go back, see if it’s clear, and then grab anything we don’t want them to get.” She uncoiled and sprang off the bench, needing action like it was air to breathe.

Maybe when all this was done they could somehow slip under the radar again, and he could buy the place back for them. Not too likely though. As he stood up, he automatically checked his search results and froze.

“ _Guys._ We’re not their only problem.” They both stopped short, all attention locked on him. “One of the EMTs that brought Emilia in has turned.”

“They picked her up three days ago,” Eliot said, frowning. “How come it took so long?”

Alec skimmed the first article in the list, taking in the information as quickly as he could. “They put all the responders into at-home quarantine, just as a precaution. This guy lived by himself, so nobody knew what was going on until his girlfriend stopped by. Guess she was worried ’cause she hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days. And she let him out.” He jumped back up to the lead paragraph and reread it, the initial shock sliding into growing horror. “Oh, this is bad. This is real bad. He killed a couple people, including the girlfriend, injured and turned several more, and—and—oh god.” He choked, swallowed hard. “The dead people. They got back up. So the witnesses say; there’s nothing official yet. But if it’s true—if it’s true, we’ve got actual, for real, raise-the-dead zombie virus going on here. Like, serious _Night of the Living Dead_ –type stuff.” His breathing started coming faster as he spoke, pulling tight in his chest.

“Hardison, calm down,” Parker said.

He’d been reassured as soon as he realized that Eliot was still alive—live-alive, not dead-alive. And once they’d sorted out the whole brain thing, he’d totally forgotten all of his fear. Because those others were locked up tight in a building, easy to think of as distant abstractions, and Eliot was their protector, always, and while he could be _scary_ he was never _frightening_ , and there _was_ a difference, even if he didn’t have the spare intellectual capacity right at that moment to put it into words. Even poor, tragic Emilia had been just a sick person in a hospital bed. (Though if he’d been there when everything went crazy he might have changed his mind—Parker’s expression had been shut down hard when she talked about it, telling nothing but the straight facts, but her voice had been raw and strained.)

“ _Hardison_.”

“I’m calm.” He gulped. “I’m calm. Let’s go. I’ll finish reading in the car.”

* * *

Leaning back from his laptop, Hardison rubbed at his temples. _Man_ , it had been a long day. Straight from the shock of the latest zombie news to the no-longer-theirs apartment, where they’d taken, hidden, or trashed everything important. (Except for the chair he’d made for Eliot, which they’d had to leave where it was, and he’d seen Eliot run his hand along the back for a long, slow moment before turning away to yell at them to hurry up. He was going to make Eliot another one someday, when all this was over. He swore it.)

Then they’d hit the road, taking Eliot’s truck. (Not that Alec didn’t love Lucille dearly, but she was less suited to long drives and hauling stuff, so he’d left her in the long-term parking garage under a safely non-pub-related alias). But they weren’t just running, oh no. Because they’d lost their access to Emilia, and the law folks had finally cracked the AdVitam lab (and he had an open window onto their discoveries thanks to the bugs Parker/Hagen had installed on various computers), so there was just one place left for them to go. They were taking their fight to the top—to the corporate bosses who were claiming that they had no answers, who were dragging the investigations out with excuses and promises, who were surely covering _something_ up.

Look out, AdVitam. Leverage was coming for you.

Given Eliot’s condition, they hadn’t wanted to risk flying, which meant—road trip. AdVitam’s headquarters was near San Francisco, and if it had just been him and Eliot, they could’ve made it in one shot, switching off drivers, but Parker got squirrelly sitting in a car for too long, and she ran out of naps at about the four-hour mark. So they’d had to take a number of Parker breaks, and by the time they hit midnight, Eliot was thoroughly fed up, and he’d pulled them over at the first reasonably nontrashy motel they came to. (A stop that Hardison was grateful for, but still, would it have killed Eliot to give him a little advance warning so he could google up a place that wasn’t a threadbare remnant from the ’70s, right down to the harvest-gold and orange décor with the brown accents? At least they had wifi, even if it was painfully slow.)

Eliot had just finished showering, having called dibs on the bathroom the second they arrived, and even through the closed door Alec could smell the reek of bleach as he did his cleanup. It was nasty, but Eliot insisted on it—the man was scared to death that they were going to catch zombie cooties from, whatever, his toe lint or something. As long as he didn’t pee in the tub (did pee even carry the virus? who knew?) or lick the shower head, Alec wasn’t too concerned.

He _was_ getting concerned about Parker, though. As soon as Eliot had started cleaning, she’d gotten tense and twitchy, and now she was pacing in one direction, then another, then another, both hands clamped over her mouth and nose. “Babe,” he called softly, “come on over here,” in the hope that he could help her to settle down, but she ignored him, or just plain didn’t hear, instead turning jerkily onto a new tangent.

Eliot came out at last, wearing boxers and a loose tank top, his hair damp and slicked back, and the waft of warm, moist air carried a fresh wave of bleach smell. “Next,” he muttered, dumping his clothes on the bed that Alec wasn’t sitting on.

“Why do you have to do that!” Parker burst out. Eliot glanced at her with a frown that was part puzzled but mostly annoyed, and she thrust her hand out toward the bathroom door. “That! With the—the—” Her face scrunched up in loathing.

“You know why I have to do it,” Eliot growled, his expression darkening.” So quit complaining.”

“No!” Parker’s voice scaled up higher and louder, starting to verge on a yell. “No, I’m not going to stop complaining! It’s awful! I hate it!”

Eliot turned on her, actively glaring now, his shoulders tensing. “Do you think _I_ like it? It stinks, and it’s a fucking pain in the ass, but I’m doing it for your sake, so just—just shut up!”

“Don’t you _tell_ me to shut up!”

“Whoa, guys,” Alec tried to break in.

“I’m throwing that stuff out.” Parker stomped toward the bathroom, and Eliot stepped quickly past the end of the bed to block her way.

“Don’t—don’t— _no_ , Parker.” Leaning in closer than was really safe, he raised an angry pointing finger. “Don’t you take that, ’cause then I’m just going to have to go out and get some more. So leave it alone. You hear me?” She coiled in on herself like a venomous snake, her eyes going narrow and vicious, and he eased off, but just barely. If it’d been anybody but Eliot, Alec would’ve been scared for him. “Anyway, this is for your own good,” Eliot said, finally pulling away from her.

“I don’t care—”

“Well, _I_ care. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t—”

“—and people always say that, ‘it’s for your own good,’ and it’s lies, it’s all lies, it’s _never_ —”

“—you want this, this thing, is that what you’re telling me?”

“No!”

“ _Guys_ —”

“Then what do you want from me? Huh? What should I be doing here? You tell me!”

“I don’t know!” Parker wailed. Tears were starting to well in her eyes. “Just stop! Just _stop!_ ”

“ _You’re_ the one who needs to stop, Parker—”

With a wordless scream, Parker whipped around and stalked out of the motel room, slamming the door behind her.

Okay. That was...not good. Parker hadn’t had a meltdown like that in a long time. And even though she’d left the room, the tension stayed, thick and electric, like that storm hadn’t cleared the air at all, only made it heavier, more threatening. He’d talk to Parker whenever she reappeared, but for right now Eliot was what he had to deal with, and Eliot had locked down hard, going still and silent in a way that felt a whole lot more dangerous than his shouting.

“Hey, man, ease up, all right?” Alec said, trying to sound calm and reasonable, and not like he was stressed out and wishing with all his heart that someone else could be doing the emotional labor here. “Look, she’s tired, we’re tired, let’s all just—”

—and Eliot exploded into motion, driving his fist full force toward the wall. He pulled the blow just shy of connecting, his knuckles barely skimming the surface, and spun away, his hands clenching and opening furiously. Snatching a pillow off the bed, he hurled it across the room. The ineffectual _fwhump_ when it landed only seemed to make him angrier. He paced a tight circle, no more than a step or two across, like an animal in a cage barely larger than its body, then lunged for the desk and swept everything off it onto the floor—phone, ice bucket, lamp, the room’s shadows leaping wildly as the light fell and broke.

“Whoa, whoa, Eliot!”

_Not enough_ , said every line of Eliot’s body, the blazing eyes, the savage twist of his snarl. _Not enough violence._ Seizing the desk chair, he swung it and smashed it into the mirror, again, and again, glass shards splintering and flying, falling like ice.

“ _Eliot!_ ”

The chair broke; Eliot dropped it and reeled back a step. His chest heaved; the slowness of his breathing made it look like he was strangling. This was the shadow of the _real_ thing, Alec realized, a shiver creeping down the back of his neck, what that MMA job had been only a thin cardboard copy of: the fury that Eliot usually kept leashed tight. He watched Eliot shake with need and with the effort to control it, watched him fight back that rage, swallowing it down like it hurt him, until his expression turned cold and hard.

He didn’t look at Alec. Instead, he turned and grabbed his jeans.

“What—what’re you—”

“ ’M going out.” He jerked his pants up and fastened them like he was putting on combat gear, his movements brusque and precise.

Alec shook his head, trying not to freak out. There was no way he’d be able to stop Eliot if the man was really set on leaving, and ragey zombie Eliot should not be walking the streets of Small Town, California, in the wee hours of the morning. “Bad idea, man. That’s a _bad_ idea right now.”

“Fuck off.” Eliot started for the door, stepping up onto the bed to avoid the broken glass on the floor.

“It’s _your_ rule!” Alec snapped, pissed off now as well as anxious, because _don’t you tell me to fuck off, mister_. “It’s your own goddamn rule. You don’t go out anywhere by yourself.” Eliot stopped and looked at him for the first time, staring down from all the extra height the bed gave him. His tank showed off the muscles of his arms and chest as well as scars of a life of fighting; his hair was wild, his jaw set in fierce belligerence, his eyes lightless black wells onto night, and _god_ , he was hot. Also terrifying. But hot.

Closing the laptop, Alec set it aside and stood up slowly, keeping his hands in view and not making any sudden movements. “Now, if you want space, I can give you space. I can go out for a while. But if you leave this room, I’m coming with you.” He locked eyes with Eliot and waited, because he could be a stubborn bastard too. Had Eliot ever spent three straight months trying to complete a God Run of the entire Soulsborne series? No, no he had not.

Finally Eliot looked away. Stepping off the bed, he dropped to the floor, then sat, kicking his legs up onto the mattress and deliberately ignoring Alec. That was not a happy face—in fact, it was grim and just barely resigned to staying put—but Alec would take it as a win.

He collected his jacket, then took the car keys as well as a motel key, darting a wary glance at Eliot, but Eliot didn’t react. Neither of them spoke as he left the room.

Once outside, he blew out a long breath, letting some of the adrenaline drain out of him, then glanced up and around. “Babe, are you still out here?” he called. There was no answer, and the motel building was low, with few bushes or other hiding places around it, so Parker had probably gone somewhere else.

Once he got in the truck, he realized that he wasn’t sure where he was going. Pulling out his phone, he searched around on the map, and when he finally found something, he grimaced in annoyance. “Really? Thirty minutes to the nearest twenty-four-hour store? Ugh. They’re all barbarians out here.” It wasn’t like he wanted to spend the time sitting around in the parking lot, though, so he started up and headed out.

The drive gave him plenty of time to reflect. _Scary but not frightening_ , he’d said of Eliot, just earlier that same day. Was it still true?

_Yes_ , he thought. Improbably, implausibly true. In the moment he’d been shocked, badly shaken, even, but never once had he believed that Eliot would turn that violence against him. Eliot was a force of nature, like an earthquake, or a storm, but he was also their shelter. Even in the very earliest days, when they’d all barely known each other and there had been an awful lot of rough edges to scrape against, his threats had been pure bluster, and he’d never laid a hand on any of them, nor even seriously threatened to. The one exception was that time it had looked like he was about to give Nate a beatdown, but Nate was being a complete and utter shit, and being drunk as a skunk was no excuse. (And why did people say that, did skunks have a particular reputation for boozing? He put that at the bottom of his list of random things to look up at some point.) As soon as Sophie had put herself in between them, Eliot had stopped. Even though he could’ve moved her easily, with a bruise or two at worst, he’d walked away.

Mindless zombie Eliot was legitimately frightening, but it was the mindlessness that inspired fear. The fact that something looked like Eliot, but Eliot wasn’t in there, or he was inside but locked away, far out of reach. And god, how Eliot would grieve if he ever came back to find that he’d done something unspeakable to them....

That didn’t bear thinking about. Alec set an intention to do everything in his power to keep it from ever coming to pass, then firmly turned his mind away from those mental pictures.

Instead, he thought about where they were going, what they were doing, what he still had to learn so he could give his beautiful girl the tools she needed in order for them to take these bad guys apart—all the way to the Walmart, up and down its aisles, and then finally back to the truck with a purchase or three. All-nighters were nothing to him, but it was probably time to go back to the motel and check on how Eliot was doing. Getting into the cab, he shut the door and stuck the key into the ignition.

“I don’t think I can go back in there,” Parker said, sitting up in the back seat.

If he hadn’t been seatbelted in, he’d’ve literally hit the roof. (And if ever Eliot heard about this, he’d get such a lecture: “ _Always look in the back seat! Always!_ ”) Shaking his head, he bit down on the _woman, don’t do that_ and glanced up to study her face in the rearview mirror. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, and his heart melted for her. Again.

“We’ll get you a separate room, mama.” Or they could both share another room, leaving Eliot to himself, but that didn’t seem like the best idea. Smiling, he lifted his hand, and after a moment Parker’s slim fingers laced between his, fitting the two of them together, the contact lightly held but true and trusting and sweet.

“I could sleep in the truck,” she said, as if testing out the thought.

“Or that. Whatever you want, baby. Whatever’s good for you.” He brushed his thumb against hers. “We’ll sort things out in the morning,” he murmured. “Okay?”

Parker rested her head against the seat back. “Okay.”

* * *

Through the straining whirr of the bathroom fan, he heard the door to their room open and close, a moment’s hesitation, and then Hardison’s uncertain voice. “Eliot?”

“Here.” The fan covered the sound of footsteps, and he couldn’t smell anything through the lingering bleach, so it was only by counting seconds and measuring the familiar length of Hardison’s strides against them that he knew when to expect the man to appear in the doorway. Hardison paused to peer down at him through the dimness, the only light being from the one lamp in the other room that still worked. In answer to the not-yet-asked question of _why are you sitting in the bathtub_ , Eliot shifted his hand, smiling wryly. The handcuff’s chain clinked against the accessibility bar, the only hardpoint he’d been able to find that would hold against a solid yank.

“Are you kidding me, man?” Hardison sounded outraged, as though he was personally offended by the situation. “Are you planning to spend the night in there?”

Eliot shrugged. “I’ve slept in worse places.” He’d dried it out with a towel first, and since it was free of rocks, scorpions, venomous snakes, foul weather, or incoming enemy fire, he had nothing much to complain about. Wasn’t like he was planning to get a lot of sleep, anyway.

“Nope! Nuh-uh,” Hardison declared. Spinning on his heel, he marched away.

Which was how Eliot found himself in a nest made up of both bedspreads, a blanket, and three pillows, two of which ended up on the floor, because there was only so much room in a bathtub. Hardison fussed over how his arm was going to go to sleep being held up like that, and he growled back at Hardison’s ridiculous mother-henning, and everything should probably not be so normal after the fit he’d pitched earlier, but somehow it was.

“Here,” Hardison said, once they were done, “I got something for you.” He tossed Eliot a plastic bag. Opening it, Eliot found a pair of MMA fighting gloves, black synthetic leather with the brand name blazoned across the knuckles. “Tried to get you one without a logo, but there wasn’t much selection at the local big box store. If it’s an issue we can probably black it out until you find something better.”

Eliot pulled on the right glove and flexed his hand. The fingers came down to his second knuckles, and his palm and thumb were left bare; it wouldn’t affect his grip any. Closing his fist, he smacked it into his other palm. Felt good. There was enough padding to protect him but not enough to soften his blows.

“I saw you whiff that punch earlier.” He glanced up at Hardison, whose mouth curved in a slight smile. “Least this way you can do your hitting without busting your knuckles open.”

“Thanks, man,” he said, drawing off the glove and dropping it on top of the other one in his lap. Yeah, he’d realized at the very last instant that punching the wall was probably going to split the skin; he’d just barely been able to reel it back in time. (And he knew better than to punch something that solid anyway, when he was thinking straight.) After Hardison had left, he’d looked himself over carefully to make sure he hadn’t actually cut himself on anything—had gone around the room as well, though he hadn’t even been sure what he was looking for if there weren’t any visible wounds on him, but paranoia wouldn’t let him settle until he’d double checked. This was getting really fucking old.

“You need anything?” Hardison asked, and he pushed the frustration down. The situation was what it was; and no matter what he felt about it he wasn’t going to slack off on their safety.

“Nah, I’m good,” he said. As Hardison started to turn away, he added, “Hey. I called housekeeping to come in and clean up. Told them it was okay, something just got out of hand, and they should charge it to our bill.” Hardison would’ve already noticed the obvious lack of mess, but he figured he ought to explain it.

“Things got out of hand, huh? So was that conversation before or after you chained yourself up?” Hardison asked, his eyes sparkling, and Eliot wrinkled his nose at him.

“Funny. Go to bed.” Another thought occurred to him. “Parker?”

“She’s going to be staying somewhere else tonight.” Hardison’s expression was soft, far softer than he deserved. “We’ll work it out all out, okay?” Stepping back, he gave Eliot a tiny salute. “G’night, man. Get some rest.”

“Night.”

He wasn’t sure whether Hardison was actually planning to go to sleep or was going to stay up all night working on the computer, but before long the light in the other room went out. He could still see perfectly fine, thanks to the bathroom’s illuminated light switch, but the dim orange glow wasn’t so bright as to be bothersome. Looking down at the gloves in his lap, he ran his finger along one of them, tracing a ridge of stitching.

He hadn’t lost his shit that badly in years. And it wasn’t Parker’s fault. The tension had been wearing on him, winding him up and up with no chance of release.

He needed a reset; that was for sure. Tilting his head back against the pillow propped between him and the wall, he thought through his plan for the next day, then closed his eyes, breathed deep and slow, relaxed all his muscles, and dropped into sleep.

* * *

Riding in a car as a passenger was usually dull, dull, dull, but at least this road was less boring than the one from the day before. Instead of a straight four-lane highway strung out across a whole lot of nothing, aimed at a distance-fuzzed horizon full of even _more_ nothing, it had whipped through hills covered in forests and farms and then forests again, its steep grades and sharp cutbacks piled one right on top of another so that everything after the next hairpin curve was a surprise. It would’ve been awesome if she could’ve driven it herself, but Eliot never let her handle his cars. At least he was a good driver, if not nearly as much fun as Sophie.

A few minutes ago they’d come out of the forest, and now they were on a road that roughly paralleled a wild-looking shoreline. The sea and sky were on her right, a line of hilltops lumped up to her left, all covered in dry grass the same golden-brown plush as Bunny’s fur, and the wind caught in her hair as she rested her crossed arms on the bottom edge of the window, her cheek pillowed on top of them.

At last they turned into a pullout on the seaward side of the road, one just large enough for a couple of cars. At the moment it was empty except for theirs. A few feet away the ground dropped off sharply; when Eliot got out of the truck and walked toward that edge, she followed, puzzled but curious.

“Man, what are we _doing_ here?” Hardison demanded, getting out too and thumping the door shut with more force than really necessary.

“I need to clear my head.” With a half shrug, Eliot added, low voiced, as if he wasn’t sure that they needed to (or ought to?) hear, “Maybe it’ll help you guys too.” The drop-off wasn’t quite a cliff, but it was still steep, and a rough path cut down from where they stood toward a crescent of brown-sand beach below. Eliot started down the trail, not looking back to see if they were with him.

“Yeah, well, y’know what, I’m going to stay and clear my head right here.” Hardison was behind her, still next to the truck, but he was using his pointing-emphatically voice, so she could imagine his expression. “Two words for you, man: _Sand. Fleas._ ” The truck’s door opened again, and when it closed, it sounded like a _hmph_.

She didn’t know what was supposed to be head-clearing about a place like this. When she needed to clear her own head, she took a dive off a nice, tall building, but there’d been a sad lack of those since they’d left the city. (And Portland itself didn’t have very many skyscrapers. She was definitely looking forward to San Francisco. Maybe she could make time to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. She’d never done that before, and it was supposed to be very scenic.).

Still, they could be here for a while, and she wasn’t going to sit in the truck the whole time, so she decided to see what Eliot was up to. The trail was less a trail than some flat places between and on top of rocks, so she hopped boulder to boulder instead, arriving at the bottom just a little ahead of Eliot. It wasn’t a big beach at all; actual cliffs hemmed it in on either side, curving outward until they broke up into slope-sided rocks jutting out into the ocean. Wave swells broke against them, spraying white foam, but on the sheltered beach the waves were unimpressive little lapping ripples. Eliot walked past her, closer to the water’s edge. He picked up a stone, turned it in his hands, then pitched it far out over the ocean. It fell into the water with a distant _plunk_.

She could relate to the urge to throw rocks at things, but this seemed like a long way to come just to do that. Still. She found a decent rock, one that fit nicely in her hand but wasn’t interesting enough to be important, and hurled it out as far as she could. It fell well short of Eliot’s, of course.

_Plunk._

She glanced at Eliot to see his reaction, but he’d already walked away from her, moving off along the beach.

He was being weird. And she knew it was because of what had happened the night before. It had been terrible for them both, and things still weren’t right, even though they’d been careful with each other all morning, and that was one kind of apology. They still needed words to treat the cracks between them (or word equivalents, like Eliot’s cooking, except he couldn’t cook for her now, ever, at all, and that just piled onto the other terribleness and made it worse), but she didn’t want to talk about it because she didn’t want to think about it; she didn’t want to end up back there again. _When you’re ready_ , Hardison always said, Eliot always said, but she wasn’t ready. Maybe Eliot wasn’t either.

She understood needing space—she’d always needed to have space apart, and she’d learned to appreciate space together, with others quiet but nearby. Maybe that was what Eliot needed now.

Turning away from him, she started investigating the beach. Dry sand, wet sand, pebbles (lots of pebbles), smooth gray-white logs. She found a heap of brown, strappy, plasticky-shiny stuff that she thought was probably seaweed, but it could also be a creature from _Star Trek_. Or _Doctor Who_. A face-eating thing. Warily she poked it with a stick, and when it didn’t leap up at her or scuttle away, she left it behind, just glancing back a couple of times to make sure it hadn’t moved.

There were shells, too: sleek ones, spiraling ones, ridged ones, scooplike ones with iridescent mother-of-pearl inside. She picked them up, ran her fingers over their different textures, then let them fall. She didn’t need to keep any, but if she found a really cool one, she might take it back for Hardison.

Among the shells, a deep green something caught her eye. Instinctively she pounced on it. It was hard with rounded edges, like a pebble or a tumbled stone, but—she tested its weight, then tapped a fingernail against it. Not stone, but glass. Like costume jewelry, except instead of being clear and gemstone-shiny it was opaque, with a dull, sanded surface. It felt nice to hold, though, and she liked the color: a rich Columbian emerald green, her favorite. Picking her way along the shore, she found more pieces: greens in all different shades, amber and gold, cobalt blue and very pale turquoise. Cupped in her hand, their muted colors made her feel soft and still, and something else that she couldn’t put a name to, not quite “wanting,” not quite “sad.” Almost like “someone should steal this before it’s gone,” but she didn’t know what “it” was or where it might go. She turned them over, and their subtly rough texture reminded her of callused fingers, gentle on her skin.

Looking up, she located Eliot. He was sitting on one of the big rocks at the base of the cliffs, gazing out across the water, motionless except for the onshore wind mussing his hair.

Enough space, she decided.

It was a quick, fun little scramble, out along a water-slicked ledge and then a jump to get finger holds on the top of the rock and pull herself up. She’d never tried any serious rock climbing, but someday she probably should—those cliffs looked really interesting. She wondered if Hardison would like it any better than bungee jumping.

She let her shoes scuff as she approached Eliot, just in case he hadn’t seen her coming. He acknowledged her with a head tilt. If he didn’t want her there, he’d tell her, so she sat down next to him, leaving a couple of feet between them. Tucking her jacket more securely around her, she watched the ocean too, listened to the roll and shush of the breaking waves.

“Why here?” she asked at last.

“There’s places,” he said, then paused to clear the rasp from his throat, “places where the sky seems to run on forever. Like in the mountains, sometimes. Or in the desert. You stand in places like that, and you feel just how big the world is, and how small you are in it.” Glancing sideways, she studied his expression. Calm, she thought, maybe a little tired—serious, like that time when he’d explained to her about his cooking, as if it was imperative that she understand, but his voice was quieter, less emphatic, the words seeming to come less easily. “Some people don’t like it. It frightens them, being that small. But to me it makes it feel like everything is wide open. Like there’s so much room to just _be_.”

Eliot had been a lot of places, she realized. Well, she’d been to lots of places too, but pretty much all of them had been cities, where there were plenty of worthwhile things to steal. She couldn’t really imagine what she’d do in a place that was so empty. She could picture Eliot there, though, strong and steady, an anchor point underneath all that sky.

“When I got over my claustrophobia, I wasn’t scared of being in small spaces anymore, but there’s still something in me that can’t stand being boxed in. I left my hometown because I knew there was nothing there for me. I couldn’t live according to their expectations, couldn’t keep within their lines. My life would’ve been too small.” He hesitated, and she noted the tiny movement of his throat as he swallowed. “That was part of it, y’know, with all the off-the-books missions I did. And...with Moreau. I did terrible things, and I can’t make any excuses for that. But there were times, especially in the early days when I could still feel, before I went dead inside, that having no limits, no restrictions, fed something in me. Something wild and angry and...raw. All they did was give me the order. Then they took off the leash and let me run.”

She frowned, trying to work out the connections between Eliot-that-was and her Eliot, here and now. She understood the need to run. To get out, to get free. She never saw that desperate tension in Eliot, but she wasn’t sure that meant anything, because his control of his face and body was so good. He did go away sometimes, though, to do things he never talked about—not as often as when there had been five of them, but sometimes. Slowly, testing the ground beneath them, she asked, “Do you feel trapped here? With us?”

“No.” And he looked straight at her for the first time. She could feel the intensity in his eyes, even though she couldn’t see them through the sunglasses. “Never. I chose this. I choose it every day. Being with you, and with Hardison. Following where you lead.” He looked away again, down at the rolling-in-and-out waves. They boomed against the rocks, and their spray, falling back from the crash in little drops like rain, sizzled as it returned to the sea. “I wasn’t mad at you, Parker. What makes me mad is that I feel so...so...I _hate_ that I _can’t_ touch you, _can’t_ kiss you, _can’t_ give you what you’re asking me for, no matter how much I want to. And there’s no way for me to fight this. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do. The only option I have is to hold to that fine line of being _so_ fucking careful. It’s,” he paused, drawing a rough breath, “...it’s hard.”

She wanted to rest her hand over his, but maybe that was too much, too close, too difficult just then. Instead she hitched nearer, until there were only inches between them. After a moment, he curved his arm around her, drew her in, strong but gentle, and she leaned against his shoulder.

_Boom. Hiss._ Over and over. A slow drum beating, like Eliot’s heart. And in front of them, nothing but wide-openness. Sea and sky.

“It brings back memories.” The words rushed out of her, into a lull between waves. “The—” She couldn’t say. She flapped her hand in front of her face.

“I’m sorry,” Eliot said, low and aching, like a bone-deep bruise. “I don’t know what else...the doc said that was the best, safest thing to use. And I’m already diluting it as much as I can.” He blew out a sharp breath through his nose. “I’ll get a separate room. Hardison can rebook—”

“ _No_.” He was already forced to be too far away. And it wasn’t fair, and she didn’t want to be—to be stuck like this anymore. To find herself inside a cage of memory, her breath going tight with fear. “Just— _help me_.” She felt it in his body as he got what she didn’t really understand herself, felt him nod, and some of the tension sighed out of her.

She thought of Hardison then, waiting alone in the van. This had been an Eliot-and-her thing, but now she wanted him too. But....

“Do you think Hardison wants to be regular people?” she asked.

“Nah,” Eliot said after a moment’s consideration. “Maybe he thinks he does sometimes. Or maybe there are just certain things that strike him that way. But he can’t live inside those lines either, no more than you and I can. That’s why we are who we are. Why we do what we do.”

Eliot always made so much sense. And he seemed better now. Maybe there was something to this open sky thing. (Or maybe Sophie’s advice about talking about feelings was right again.) She unwound herself from under his arm and stood, offering her hand to help pull him up even though he didn’t need it.

“Can I drive now?” she asked as they climbed down off the rock.

“No.” He didn’t even sound annoyed. “Aside from the fact that I want to get where we’re going in one piece, driving like today...that helps too.” She understood—the shifting speeds and rhythms of those curves (so different from the mind-numbing straight road of the day before) were like the katas that she sometimes watched Eliot do: step, strike, strike, turn, step, strike. It was a combination of calming and controlling: the good kind of control, gathering oneself together, like checking the rig before a jump.

There was a leap coming up at some point, she realized. She wondered where and when it would happen.


	7. Chapter 7

Alec went to put down his soda and nearly set it on top of the crab claw Parker had left on the desk. Eying it with mistrust, he nudged it aside with the bottle. Considering they’d been introduced by Parker going “ _Nyar nyar nyar!_ ” and chomping it at him like tiny toothy jaws (and biting him on the earlobe with it, _woman, what are you doing to me?_ ), he felt his suspicion was justified. He wondered how soon he could get away with “losing” it.

(Although Parker’s suggestion that he should make a crab-robot had potential. Just as soon as he figured out what it would be best suited for. And after they were done with the job, of course.)

“Hey, guys,” he called as Parker and Eliot came into their hotel suite, carrying several bags of groceries and other needful things. “Guess what? I’ve been tracking the news, and they _still_ have not come out with our real names.” He clapped his hands in victory. “My faith in humanity has not been misplaced.”

“Good for you,” Eliot said dryly, already unloading the food into the refrigerator to join his special supplies, which had been liberated from their cooler earlier. “You got lucky, man.”

He ignored the cynicism. “So far they’re still looking for FBI Special Agent Hagen and Shaun Mason, aka ‘Eliot,’ with ‘unidentified Black man’ as a possible associate.” He’d tried to keep under the radar as much as possible, but staying near Eliot for all the testing meant that being seen had been unavoidable. “Nice job ducking the camera angles, El. With that and the hats and shades, they don’t have much for facial recognition. Don’t know how they got your first name, though.

“I might have shouted it,” Parker said, looking a little crestfallen. “Heat of the moment. My bad.”

“It helped get me out of the mind lock, so I’m not complaining.” Eliot came out of the kitchenette and dropped into one of the chairs. “What else you got?”

“SWAT team’s finished clearing the victims out of the lab. That was...messy.” What would have been a decent first-person shooter walkthrough stopped being entertaining when the video was of actual used-to-be-human-beings getting gunned down and the guys wearing the cameras were legitimately freaking out. He’d skimmed through the footage, catching as little detail as he could. “They’re still processing evidence, so not much new there. Otherwise I spent some time shoring up Special Agent Hagen’s identity.”

“Why?” Parker had drifted up behind him and now draped herself against his back, her chin on his shoulder and her arms loosely wrapped around him. “I thought we burned that alias.”

“Nah, I’m keeping it live. Let ’em chase that ghost. If they’re busy profiling her and trying to figure out when and how she went bad, they’re not working on digging up a real suspect. And who knows, maybe she’ll come back into play somewhere down the road.”

“Now you’re the one talking about Parker’s aliases like they’re separate people.” Eliot smirked, sprawling comfortably in his seat. Compared to the last time they’d been in a hotel room, it was like night and day. Even though they’d rolled up to their destination a couple of hours later than originally planned, the detour had been more than worth it. He didn’t know what Eliot and Parker had gotten up to, although the incurably nosy part of himself would really like to (and the definitely not insecure part of himself was a little hurt at being left out), but whatever it was had resolved the tension between them, and he was grateful for that. So he’d only sassed them a little when they got back to the car.

( _“So, y’all done having your hot sexy-times on the beach?”_

_“Trust me, man, there ain’t nothing hot about having sex on a beach. Getting sand all up in everywhere ain’t exactly my idea of a good time.”_

_“...that wasn’t a ‘no.’ ”_

_“NO, we did not fuck on the beach!”_

_“Hey, Hardison—how do you feel about rock climbing?”_ )

The rock climbing part _did_ disturb him.

Thinking about that exchange brought with it a twinge of guilt. He probably shouldn’t have teased on Eliot on the subject of sex. Eliot hadn’t seemed to take it badly, but it was a pain point for them all. He still wasn’t convinced that sex was never, ever going to happen again, but that was a discussion for another time when they were all under a lot less stress.

With contagiousness at the forefront of his mind, he remembered the virus study team’s server and decided to take a poke at it, just for kicks. He slid on up to his private entrance, fully expecting that it would be shut down and he’d have to pry open a new one, and...well. Would you look at that.

“Huh _._ ” He added a bit of extra code to his exploit to confuse and deflect any backtrackers, just in case this was a trap (he highly doubted that the Oregon Health Authority was that sophisticated, but there was a nonzero chance that the FBI was in on this), and popped through the gate to the network. File trees started flowing down his screen. “Well, well. What do you know. _Somebody_ was a bad girl and did _not_ report a vulnerability to IT.” He tsked gleefully. “So let’s see what all’s new here.” He filtered for files added or changed since his last incursion, and among the most recent was a notebook app document named “AVZ Case Journal” in the personal directory of one Meredith Tran. Eyebrows lifting, he opened it and started to read.

_I’ve created this journal in order to keep an informal record of the Emilia Cruz case and developments in the study of the AVZ virus, primarily for reference but also to note down my personal thoughts on the situation. Anyone who stumbles across this is more than welcome to read it (I’m looking at YOU, Bob from EIS, and also Special Agent Davin and associates; I know that you’re still investigating me, so have fun with this), but be aware that it will contain OPINIONS as well as scientific data._

_(Speaking of opinions, I still protest the working designation for this virus. These people are not ZOMBIES.)_

Alec laughed in pure delight. “Oh, Dr. Tran. You are _fierce_.”

“What’d you find?” Parker asked. She’d drifted away from him at some point; when he glanced toward her, she seemed to be eying the curtain rod speculatively.

“She’s left a message for us.” He chuckled again. “You go, Doc.”

_I’ll go back and fill in the details prior to this point later, when I have more time. Right now, this is how things stand...._

“Okay, so let’s see what’s up.... Oh, El, she sprained her shoulder but otherwise she’s okay. No other serious injuries to anyone.” Eliot nodded, his expression showing a hint of relief. “She’s insisting that she never heard the name ‘Eliot,’ just ‘Shaun’—heh, liar, liar, pants on fire. And she says that she didn’t know my name at all—aw, boo, hiss, she didn’t come up with a cool alias for me? Gotta work on that, lady.”

“She obviously doesn’t have any experience,” Parker said. There was a loud rattle from the direction of the window, and he should possibly look up to see what was going on, but he was otherwise engrossed at the moment.

“She’s doing pretty good, for all that.” The next section was an update on the progress of the research team. “They’re still working on untangling the structure of the virus, so no real news there. Ooh, but they’re pretty sure they’ve figured out how it’s transmitted.” He could practically feel the intensity of listening in the room jack up several levels. “Looks like it’s carried by blood, saliva, and sexual fluids.” Damn. “It’s not airborne, and it doesn’t pass through fomites.”

“What’re fomites?” Parker asked. _Rattle, clunk_.

Surprisingly, Eliot answered first. “They’re—Parker, don’t do that—they’re any physical object that can transmit infections. Like hair or skin cells, or clothing, even things like door knobs.” At Alec’s stare, he bristled. “What, you think I can’t do research too? I _know_ how to google.”

Alec grinned. “You went straight to Wikipedia, didn’t you.”

“Hey, for a starting point Wikipedia is _fine_ —”

—and Parker _whooshed_ out of the room and into the connecting suite like the Flash. Alec and Eliot shared a startled _what the...eh, it’s a Parker thing_ look, before Alec turned back to the computer.

“No new cases—that’s a plus. They’ve tightened the quarantine on the other responders, but the doc thinks they’ve passed the point of showing symptoms. Might still be contagious, though.” Motion from the corner of his eye distracted him as Parker bounded back into the room, carrying Eliot’s hairbrush. She smacked Eliot on the thigh with it, then dropped to sit cross-legged in front of him. For a long moment he didn’t move. Then slowly he sat forward, took the brush from her, and started working the wind tangles out of her hair. She tilted her head back into his gentle, careful strokes, her eyes closed and her lips turned up in the same blissful smile she’d wear when savoring one of his best meals, and Eliot was smiling too, the slight but inexpressibly tender one that was only for them, that said _this is the most precious thing in the world to me_ and _you have me to the bottom of my heart and soul_ and _until my dying day_.

Alec swallowed past the tightness in his throat. And Eliot thought he was lucky beyond all deserving, and never seemed to understand that they were the lucky ones, having all of that given to them without reservation, without limit.

He was going to fuck up the people who put that virus out in the world. He was going to fuck them up _so bad_.

“ ’Kay. Okay.” He dragged his focus back to the computer. “That’s all the news from Dr. Tran. So, time to turn our attention to AdVitam. I’ve already combed through all their readily available info, but so far nothing’s jumping out at me, so we’re probably looking at an onsite run. Their corporate HQ is about twenty minutes from here.” Glancing at Parker again, he smiled. She didn’t look like she was inclined to go anywhere any time soon. “You want I should take the physical recon?” he asked.

“ _Mnngrrh._ Just give me a couple of minutes,” she sighed, melting back into Eliot’s hands.

“ ’Cause I can—all I was going to do otherwise was take a break from things—”

“You should take your break,” she said. “You’ve been working hard on the research. We’re finally here—it’s time for me to start doing stuff.”

He shrugged. “If you’re okay with it, babe.” He wasn’t going to push back; he direly needed to catch up on guild stuff and then spend a couple of hours blowing off steam in a game. A nice, nonshooting game. Maybe he could convince Eliot to duke it out with him in Mario Kart. That was always hilarious. “You need anything, we’ll be on comms.”

Eliot ran his fingers through Parker’s now-smoothed hair, then gathered it into a loose ponytail and tugged gently. Arching her spine, she tilted her head even farther back until she was looking at him upside down, grinning. Reaching up, she looped her arms around his neck to pull him closer—usually a kiss would follow, but instead Eliot distracted her with a nose boop, and aw, damn, Alec was going to expire from the cute.

“Be careful,” Eliot said as she unwound herself and stood up, all in one flowing motion, and she looked down at him with her self-assured smirk.

“When have I ever been _not_ careful?” she said, then flounced off to change clothes as Alec and Eliot stared at each other, quite possibly envisioning the same thing.

Make that things. In the plural.

Lord have mercy. Well, at least this was only a preliminary recon trip, so she wasn’t likely to stir up too much trouble.

He was going to keep telling himself that.

* * *

He’d just finished wrapping up guild business and was about to go and harass Eliot when he got dinged with an invite to a voice chat. A glance at the ID simultaneously made his heart sink and his blood boil.

M4ximumCha0s.

Fuck his life. He was more than half tempted to ignore the message, but... _maybe_ it was something important. He accepted the chat and immediately said, through gritted teeth, “What do you want, _Chaos_?” Across the room, Eliot looked up from his reading, his gaze sharp behind those glasses that he somehow managed to make totally, implausibly, borderline unfairly hot.

“So what’s up with this whole zombie thing in Portland? Is this actually legit?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Alec said loftily, covering his unease. All they needed now was for Chaos to start mixing in.

“Are you trying to insult my intelligence?” Chaos snorted. “C’mon, man. A blond ‘federal agent,’ some guy named ‘Eliot,’ and a Black rando? _Really?_ So spill. What is this, actual zombie apocalypse or some kind of lame chicken flu scenario?”

“It’s not an apocalypse _yet_. And we’d like to keep it that way. So if you start messing with us, I swear to god—” As he spoke, he was running a quick check to make sure nothing had crawled into his system. It came up clear once, twice, and then he dove for his FBI feeds.

“Good to know. ’Cause some guy contacted me to do a frame-up on one of the people there, and I was trying to figure out if I could take him for more than he’s offering.”

Alec’s brain screeched to a halt. “ _What?_ Who? Who contacted you?” he demanded.

“ _What’s going on?_ ” Parker asked over the comm, and he quickly hit mute on the call.

“Got Chaos on the line. Hang on.” He unmuted the conversation.

“—going to reveal a client’s identity? Hacker code, man. Respect the secrecy.”

“Oh, come on. Like you even care about any kind of ‘hacker code.’ ” The FBI’s files looked clean, and the day had come when he was helping the Feds secure their data. Who’d’ve thought. “Anyway, hacker code is more like guidelines than rules.”

“Nice, quote Disney at me.” Chaos sighed dramatically. “Okay, fine—I don’t sell out people who want to hire me because that’s a good way to lose future business. I’m not in this for your goody-two-shoes reasons. If I’m going to bother to do a thing for someone else, I’m going to get paid for it.”

Chaos very rarely took on jobs for or with other people; he preferred to go his own way, free to create as much havoc as he liked. And when he _did_ take a job, he was extremely selective. So if he was still researching.... “Then you haven’t actually accepted the job yet.”

“I’m still deciding if it’s worth my time.”

“Give it to me,” he said, and he heard Chaos choke on his soda.

“What?”

“Tell ’em you can’t do it, point ’em at me. Oops, you had no idea I’d screw them over. Plausible deniability.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“Aside from not getting eaten by zombies? That’s not enough for you?”

“Are you kidding, I would totally survive the zombie apocalypse. You see, I’ve got it all figured out—”

Alec muted the blather and said hurriedly, “Chaos has been in contact with someone at AdVitam. This could be it—this could be our in.” Jumping back to the voice chat, he broke into the middle of Chaos’s rambling spiel. “ _You_ would not survive the zombie apocalypse, _I_ would survive the zombie apocalypse. Stop wasting my time.”

Chaos’s voice sharpened. “No, _you_ stop wasting _my_ time. Offer or GTFO.”

Alec bit down on the urge to mock him for actually spelling out the acronym (because of course he himself _never_ spelled things out for dramatic emphasis) and focused instead on the grim necessity of bargaining. “What did he offer you?”

“One million.”

It was Alec’s turn to choke. “One...one _million_? You’re shitting me.”

“Zombie apocalypse, man. One million.”

In his mind, Alec ran over his liquid and other quickly accessible assets. “Fine,” he growled. “I will pay you that to hand over the job.”

“Nuh-uh. For you, it’s one mil, five hundred K. _In advance._ ”

“ _What?_ Are you crazy? Do you think _I’m_ crazy?”

“Call it a transfer fee.”

“One mil, two hundred K.”

“Did I stutter? One mil, _five hundred_ K.”

“One mil, three hundred K, and a world without zombies, in which the movie industry still exists, and they still make your inferior brand of soda.”

“One mil, four hundred K, and Parker dresses up as _Suicide Squad_ Harley Quinn.”

“One mil, three-twenty-five K, a world without zombies, and Parker doesn’t stab you in the dick, how about that?” Spreading his hands, he rocked back in his chair for dramatic emphasis, even though Chaos couldn’t see him. “That’s my final offer; take it or leave it.” If they lost this opening, he’d find or make another. It would probably be less terrible anyway.

“ _I might consider chipping in the extra seventy-five K if I can stab him,_ ” Parker said, and Eliot smirked.

“Oh, fine. But only because we’re _such good friends._ ” Sarcasm oozed from Chaos’s words. “You can pay me any time now.”

“Hang on, hang on, I’m getting it.” Sitting forward again, he started flying through his accounts, consolidating the money. At least he’d get _some_ of it back when he got paid for the job. A million dollars—who would even? “ _Suicide Squad_ ,” he muttered as he worked. “You have no taste. _Birds of Prey_ is far and away the better movie.”

“Better overall, maybe. Better boner material? No.”

“You’re gross.” Tap, tap, click. “Okay, the money’s going to Blackstar Escrow.”

Chaos snickered. “Only cowards use escrow.”

“Well, only fools trust you.” All the funds had gone through, and he said, “OK, now email him and blind copy me. I’m sending you the contact info to give him.” He fired off a quick DM.

“Doing the thing right now.” A minute or so later, the email appeared in his inbox. Alec virus-scanned it three times, then a fourth to be sure before opening it .

“Got it. I’m just checking it out.” Muting the call, he said, “Parker, I got a name: Alexander Meszaros. He’s the CEO.” As he spoke, he was following the email’s track to make sure that it had actually gone where it was supposed to, and oh look, wonder of wonders, Chaos had actually played it straight with him. Astounding.

“ _On it,_ ” Parker said.

“—putting me on mute, man,” Chaos was saying angrily when he came back online. “It’s rude and it makes me not want to trust you very much.”

Having a solid lead to follow had just made Alec’s day, and pissing Chaos off was the glorious icing on that cake. Grinning, he said, “Hey, sorry, I just, I got a thing going on here. Mmm, no, baby, now’s not a good time...mmm, ha ha ha, oh yeah....”

“What is that, your sexbot?” Chaos sneered. Alec liked to think that he sounded just a touch jealous, though.

“No, it’s _your_ sexbot—I reprogrammed her, and now she has visual circuits only for me. Oh babe, that’s reeeeal good....”

“You’re disgusting. Just give me my money.”

Alec sent the escrow site his approval to release the funds. “Here you go. I’d say it was a pleasure doing business with you, but it really wasn’t.”

“Likewise. Hope you enjoy the worm I sent you.”

“Dude, I _found_ the worm.”

“But did you find the _second_ worm?”

“Oh, you mean the one that I just spanked and sent running back to you?”

There was a pause, and then Chaos snarled, “Dammit!”

“That’s ‘dammit, _Hardison_ ,’ ” Eliot called. “Get it right.”

“Oh, hi, Eliot, how’s life as a brainless zombie? Oh wait, I forgot, you were already brainless.”

“You know why I’d survive the zombie apocalypse and you wouldn’t?” Alec cut in, teeth bared in a feral grin. “It’s ’cause I got friends, and you don’t. OK, we’re done here, have a nice life, _goodbye_.” He ended the call and quit the app as quickly as possible. He felt like he should sanitize his computer too, while he was at it.

But he had what he wanted. Chaos had pointed Meszaros at him; with any luck, the guy would jump to contact him immediately, and if not, they at least had a definite name to follow up on.

As he pushed back his chair, figuring he’d go and grab a fresh soda before diving into yet more research, this time focused specifically on AdVitam’s CEO, a pop-up blooped into existence in the middle of his screen. It read:

 _Just so you know, he only offered me 600K._

The pop-up was replaced by an explosion of cartoon word balloons, each one containing the word _Ha!_ They multiplied until they covered his whole desktop, and then sat there blinking at him.

Alec stared at the screen for a long moment.

“ _Nnngh!_ That— _nnnff!_ ” No words. There were _literally_ no words for what he was feeling. He flailed in impotent rage, hands balled into fists, then hunkered over his laptop, typing furiously to undo Chaos’s stupid-ass hack.

Seriously. _Seriously_. The hate he had for that guy would fill whole _multiverses_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you're wondering, EIS is the [Epidemic Intelligence Service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemic_Intelligence_Service), and Bob is working as an investigator in the field for the CDC. (And annoying Meredith, apparently.)


	8. Chapter 8

“Alexander Meszaros, San for short. CEO of AdVitam Medical Innovations.” Alec brought up a picture on the big-screen TV he’d hooked his laptop up to. The man was surprisingly young for a CEO. His greenish eyes were the dominant feature in his narrow, slightly weak-jawed face—already large, they were further exaggerated by his glasses—and his dirty blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail. His clothes were pure Silicon Valley business casual, incongruous next to the other upper management types flanking him, who were more conventionally suited. “Young hotshot who got the position by virtue of having a genius for picking out small companies on the verge of a major, cutting-edge research breakthrough, which AdVitam would then acquire and make bank on. Trouble is, he’s been on a losing streak lately. He’s been throwing a ton of money into projects that just have not been panning out, and the board of directors is starting to get antsy.” He threw up a graphic of the company’s sinking financials, not because Parker and Eliot would actually read it, but because he was _thorough_ , thank you very much.

“So he needs a win,” Parker said, leaning forward.

Alec pointed to her, nodding. “He _really_ needs a win. Or, to look at it another way, he really needs _not_ to have a disaster.” He summoned more images: the exterior of the research lab in Portland, some corporate promotional materials, and a rotating 3-D model of a neurotrophic factor protein, just because it was cool looking and he could. “The lab where Emilia worked used to be part of a company called Neuregen—their main focus was on finding ways to repair brain damage caused by things like strokes and Alzheimer’s. And man, their stuff is not just cutting edge, it is _bleeding_ edge. They were developing a unique RNA-virus-based vector to deliver nerve growth factor proteins through the blood-brain barrier—”

“Do we need to remember any of this?” Eliot broke in.

Alec gave him a wounded look. Nobody appreciated the science—he hadn’t even gotten to the really cool part about the nanomachines. With a sigh, he reeled his enthusiasm back in. “Okay, so, using the fewest and simplest words possible: they apparently custom-built a virus. Which, by the way, is why the infectious disease team has been struggling to take it apart and identify what it’s made of. Anyway, the real point, and the part that concerns us, is that this was a huge investment of money and resources for AdVitam. And now the whole thing is a complete train wreck. The lab’s destroyed, the researchers are dead, an unknown, as of yet untreatable virus has been released into the world, there are for sure going to be legal actions coming at them from all sides, and the bad publicity from this is going to totally tank their market shares. They’ll be lucky if AdVitam still exists by the time this blows over—if it ever does blow over. And our boy San is up on the chopping block.

“Hence his desire to find someone else to take the heat.” Click. “This is Liv Jackson, previously middle management at the AdVitam HQ, most recently project manager for the Neuregen research. Seems like she wasn’t real popular at HQ—she had a rep for being ‘aggressive’ and ‘abrasive’—and she was super pissed off over being transferred. Some of her emails, man.” He laughed, shaking his head. One of the lesser but still entertaining perks of his job was getting to snoop through other people’s correspondence, and this place had popcorn-worthy levels of interpersonal drama going on.

“She makes a good scapegoat,” Parker noted. “Was she in the lab when everything happened?”

“Last time I checked, the FBI hadn’t finished IDing all the bodies yet, but Meszaros sounds confident that she was there.” Alec gestured expansively. “So what he hired me—and by me, I don’t mean _me_ , but friendly neighborhood hacker EZKL.Jonz, who was recommended to him by some guy who shall not be named—what he hired this very fine and talented hacker to do was edit both sides of his email correspondence with Ms. Jackson to make it read very differently, and also scrub anything relating to it off the company servers. So he’s basically rewriting the entire story to cover his ass and put all the hinky behavior over on her side.”

“Nice,” Eliot said, with the grimace of disgust that meant somebody was really deserving of the punch that was coming to them.

“So here’s the interesting part. Hacking the emails meant I got to see them all, and while they don’t tell the whole story, one thing they do make _very_ clear is that Meszaros knew from the beginning everything that was going wrong in Portland. He was aware they had a situation brewing a week before everyone got zombified. _A week._ If they’d called in the Health Authority and the CDC at any point before then, all those people would still be okay. But he ordered Jackson to keep it quiet and deal with it in house.” God, it burned him, people like that, their selfishness and their cowardice. Just bury the whole goddamned thing, and never mind who all got buried along with it.

Smoothing his anger back under control, he went on. “She sent him data pretty regularly after that, but their email conversation dropped off—somebody probably wised up and realized that they needed to be more careful about leaving a trail, and they took everything to phone calls. But the script Meszaros wanted his fake emails to follow maybe gives us some clues. Like, he has her trying to blackmail him into bringing her back to her old job at headquarters and getting rid of the people who cut her out. So probably that was an offer he held over her to get her to go along with the lockdown.”

“But you still have the original emails and the data she sent,” Parker said, and he nodded. “So that’s enough to prove he was covering things up.” Pouting, she flopped back into a sprawl on the couch. “I guess I didn’t need to do recon after all.”

He held up his hands. “Well now, we still gotta decide how we want to handle this. Do we just want to leak the emails to the FBI? Or do we want to do a mind fuck on him and get him to make some kind of dramatic public confession? You know, for extra satisfaction.”

Parker perked up immediately. “Ooh, can we do something like what Nate did where he gave that guy a nosebleed with his brain? Except with zombie virus stuff. I want to try out that creepy mind powers thing.”

“Well...I’m not sure that goes along with the basic mastermind package, but let’s see what we can figure out.” He handed the wireless keyboard over to her and dropped next to her on the couch. “Here, bring up your notes.”

Eliot’s phone rang, drowning out the rapid ticks of Parker’s typing. He didn’t get a lot of calls, and most of the ones he did get filtered directly to voicemail, so they both glanced up automatically to make sure everything was okay. Eliot was staring at the phone’s screen, and that was _not_ an okay look.

“I gotta take this,” he said, pushing up out of the chair and heading for the doorway to the connecting suite.

* * *

He should’ve expected this was coming. Accepting the call, he lifted the phone to his ear. “Vance,” he acknowledged.

“Spencer.” Crisp and no bullshit as always. “Where are you?”

“Why?” As if he didn’t already have a good idea. He couldn’t blame Parker for dropping his name in public like that, but it was definitely going to make life complicated for a while.

“I’m calling you in.”

Yep. There it was. “I ain’t going.” Even if he were inclined to answer that summons—which he wasn’t, oath or no oath (and he’d broken that anyway, a long time ago), and especially not now, when as far as he was concerned he’d sworn himself elsewhere—chances were good he wasn’t being called in just on account of what he could do. If that was even part of the equation at all.

“Are you and your people working this case?” Vance asked.

Eliot glanced back through the connecting door. The angle was wrong to see Parker and Hardison, but he could sense tension in the quiet, could scent the sharp tang of their anxiety. And why had he walked away from them anyway? Wasn’t like they didn’t know about this part of his past. Turning, he went back into the other room and planted himself in the corner near the window. They were both staring at him, silent and poised like they were ready to launch into action at his word. He lifted his chin slightly. _We’re okay._

“We won’t get in your way,” he told Vance. On the other end of the line, he heard the man’s frustrated huff.

“Eliot—”

“I know why you’re trying to get me to come in. You ain’t stupid, and neither am I.” Both of them had played dumb muscle in their time, and it had always been a lie. Vance was no Nate—nobody was Nate, although Sterling came close—but he was sharp, and not above skirting around the truth to get what he wanted.

“And you know why you should.” His voice lowered. “You’re a danger to everyone you come in contact with, and especially to them.”

Honesty. Fucking _finally_. “I’m fine. What happened in the hospital was a freak accident. It won’t happen again.”

Now was _he_ telling the truth? If he believed in it hard enough, held onto himself hard enough, then maybe.

God, he hoped so.

“Do you think I’m going to risk the lives of potentially thousands of people, maybe more? Maybe _millions_? You’re a _disease vector_ , Spencer, don’t pretend you’re not, and there are too damn many unknown variables right now. I don’t need you being one of them. I want you where we can contain you.”

His heart was a fist inside his chest, clenched, ready to hit. “You got anything useful to say to me? ’Cause if not, we’re done here.” He gave the man the grace of time to answer, instead of hanging up immediately, and finally Vance sighed, a sound that was more than half growl.

“ _Listen_. When we got in and started clearing the lab, there were already two guys dead in there. Dead-zombie dead, broken up but still moving. Was that you?”

There was a good-sized chunk of time that was fuzzed or blacked out entirely, but he thought there might have been a fight somewhere in there. He had a vague impression of _rage_ and _protect_ and _kill_. “Yeah?”

“Did you or your people _take_ anything? Did anyone else get out?”

“Not that I know of.” Hardison and Parker would have told him if so. A feeling of wrongness had started twisting inside him, a warning instinct trying to get to the light. “The servers were stripped, though. Before we got there.”

“Uh huh. And you know what else was stripped? The lab. There were no virus samples in there. There _ought_ to be virus samples. Cultures. Some computers are missing. And we haven’t IDed everyone yet, but the number of bodies isn’t matching up with the employee list. So what do you think happened there, huh?”

“Somebody stole it. Somebody stole the virus.” He heard Hardison’s breath catch, followed by a squeaky whispered _oh damn, oh shit_ , but he was focused on the memories that were struggling back to him from the other side of the infection’s fog. “Those two guys—they were guards. I knocked them out, dragged them inside. I ditched their guns—”

“Yeah, we found them.”

“Zombies must’ve gotten to them before they woke up.” It had bothered him at the time, why someone would have a couple of armed guards patrolling outside a civilian research lab, but he’d assumed it was private security hired to keep Kenneth away. That would be overkill, though, and they’d been just a little too military in their skills. He cursed himself for having let that go. “Somebody took the virus. They infected the people—” Emilia hadn’t been turned right away, though, she’d run—“maybe not all at once, maybe just a couple and let them loose on the rest. The guards were to make sure nobody else got in. And nobody got out.”

“So nobody could tell what happened.” Vance snarled under his breath. “What the hell kind of sick fuck—”

Hardison was practically bouncing in his seat, making urgent gestures. “I gotta go.”

“You _call me_. You call me if you come across anything I can use. You hear me?”

“Yeah. I hear you,” he said. He hung up and looked at Hardison.

“Eliot, El, that’s it—one of the things Meszaros wanted to have in the fake emails was her threatening to sell the virus.” Hardison’s eyes were wide and shocked. “He sold it. He _sold_ it to someone. Holy _shit_.”

“We have to find out who,” Parker said.

“Guess we’re definitely going to AdVitam.” Hardison rubbed his hands on his pants, burning nervous energy, then stilled, looking up at Eliot again. “You okay, man?”

_You’re a disease vector, Spencer. You’re a danger to everyone you come in contact with, and especially to them._

Vance hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know. Only brought that knowledge back up to the surface, a stinging reminder of the chances he was taking. Crazy, was what this was, and stupid, undeniably stupid, and also, in all honesty, selfish. But what else was there for him? A bullet to the head, or a cage, maybe for the rest of his life, and he wasn’t sure which would be worse. And in either case, his people would be left alone. Unguarded.

“I’m fine.” Pulling himself out of his thoughts, he glanced at Hardison, who was still staring at him. “What?” he snapped. Walking to the couch, he bumped his knee against Hardison’s. “Move over.” Hardison hitched over, nudging into Parker, which made her shift over, and the two of them caterpillared down the couch like that until there was just enough room for Eliot to wedge himself in next to Hardison. As Parker’s precisely drawn map of the AdVitam headquarters appeared on the TV screen, he settled into the warmth of that contact, that presence, that trust.

He could stay careful. He could keep them safe. He told himself that, and didn’t let himself doubt it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _*pitches horseshoes in the vague general direction of science*_


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings in this chapter for some gore and unpleasant bodily reactions to terror.

He was fucked. He was so fucked.

Dragging his hand down his face, San stared at his phone. He was too numb to even glare at it the way he wanted to.

He’d _had_ this. The government got the Neuregen virus, AdVitam got remuneration, and he came out of it all fine—without a saleable product but with enough of a payout to cover the loss. The Board would’ve accepted that.

Except everything had gone wrong, and now they had a building full of corpses, and the virus was out there in the world. The news was all over it, the law was all over it, and everyone at the company was losing their shit. The only reason he still had his job was because nobody had actually been able to pin anything on him. As far as anyone knew, it was all on the people in Portland. He had to keep it that way.

And he was working the concern and empathy for the victims and promises of cooperation angles with the press just as hard as he could under the eyes of both PR and Legal. _Maybe_ , if he was really lucky, the Board would think he’d handled the situation well and give him a second chance, instead of pitching him out on the street. And if not, at least blaming Liv for it all would keep him out of jail. He hoped.

His luck had been shit lately. He should probably be working on plan B.

_Fuck_ that guy and his need for secrecy. National security. Yeah, right. Maybe he wasn’t even really military. He’d seemed to check out, though.

They’d been supposed to make everything official with the company after the handoff was done and the virus was safe in a facility somewhere. But that asshole had fucked him over. Transferred him the money and told him to deal with it by himself. Just chuck it in a company account and make vague noises about where it had come from? _Accounting doesn’t work like that, fucker._

He could come clean to the law, give them that shithead’s name, but if he did, he was going down too. No question. He was too personally involved.

And maybe what had happened in Portland hadn’t just been a “lab accident.” Maybe somebody had kicked up a fuss, or maybe that guy just hadn’t wanted there to be any witnesses. If he blew the whistle, he could end up more than fired. He could end up dead too. Or—not dead. Worse.

_He_ was technically a witness. He knew too much. The realization made him feel sick.

He should call that hacker back and see about getting a new identity and an offshore account and just fucking off to another country. San Lorenzo was supposed to be nice.

He’d just picked up his phone when there was a thump from the hallway. He froze, holding his breath. Was somebody out there? Please god, no.

Silence. Maybe he’d imagined it. It was probably all the stress. Or maybe someone was walking slowly toward his office, footsteps muffled by the carpet. Was it an assassin? Should he call 911? Would they arrive in time? What if it was a false alarm? He couldn’t let anyone see him losing his shit. Not now.

He couldn’t just sit there waiting for somebody to slink up on him, either. Clutching his phone, he got up and crept toward the door. The lights were low in the hallway. Stupid energy saving measures. Steeling his nerves, he peeked around the edge of the doorway, staring hard into the shadows. Were the halls always kept this dark at night or had someone turned the lights down further than usual?

He didn’t see anyone, but he had the feeling he was being watched.

The switches were down by the elevator. If he got down there, he could turn the lights up. Or just leave.

He’d decide when he got there.

He inched out into the hallway, and the sense of being watched seemed to intensify. Swallowing hard, he forced his voice to work. “I-Is anyone there? Hello?” The words sounded feeble against the darkness.

He took a step forward, then another. “I called 911!” he quavered. “They’re on their way now.” More silence. His skin was crawling from the tension. “The FBI is watching this building! They’ll be here any second!” And maybe the National Guard was in the storage closet, too. Jesus Christ. Not even an idiot would believe his babbling. He had to get himself together.

He reached the elevator at last, after what felt like forever. Fumbling for the light switches, he flicked them all up at once.

Someone was there, about three offices down the hall from him. A man, standing weirdly stiff and still.

“H-Hey—”

The man lurched forward a step, as if he’d been jolted into motion. His clothes—jeans, tee shirt, jacket—were dirty and torn. Stringy clumps of long, lank hair partially covered his face; where it was visible, his skin was sickly pale except for streaks of rusty red stains (that...was that...and the dark patches on his clothes…those were…) and the deep, bruiselike shadows under his eyes. His eyes...as the man took another step forward, he lifted his head with a low, rumbling groan, and San had seen the photos and footage of the infected people, he’d seen those eyes, black and soulless, he knew who, what was in front of him, oh god, oh god.

“No,” he whimpered. “No, no no no no….” The zombie was still coming. He pushed the elevator button once, twice, three-four-five, then gave up and started backing away. Slowly at first, then a little faster, and as he sped up the zombie did too, strides becoming steadier and more purposeful. It was between him and the emergency stairs; there was nowhere else to go.

Turning, he bolted for his office. He slammed the door, fumbled at the lock—and the door blasted open, crashing into him, knocking him to the floor. The zombie loomed up in the doorway. Screaming, he threw the only thing he had to hand—his phone. It bounced off the zombie’s chest. He scrambled away, staggering to his feet, and put the desk in between them, for what pathetic good that would do. _Phone, phone_ —it was coming for him, and he threw the desk lamp at it. The extremely nonaerodynamic lamp. It fell short. He tried slinging his laptop frisbee style and managed to hit the zombie’s shoulder. It didn’t even flinch.

Grabbing the landline’s receiver, he dialed 911, and as he waited, shrieking internally, for it to connect, he flung his coffee mug at the zombie. It glanced off the zombie’s temple—the creature rocked back a step, then kept coming, expressionless, those dead eyes fixed on him. He didn’t have anything else to throw, and why wasn’t the call connecting, why wasn’t it connecting—oh god, he’d forgotten to hit the button for an outside line. He jabbed at the switch to hang up and try again, and the zombie reached across the desk, ripped the phone right out of his hands. Too terrified to think, he ran around the end of the desk, making a desperate effort to escape, and the zombie caught him by the arm. It hurled him back against the wall with inhuman strength, and he cowered there, gasping for breath, hands raised in a futile attempt to protect himself as it advanced—

There was a low buzz, and a green light appeared on a metal collar around the zombie’s neck. He hadn’t noticed it before. Several strides away from him, the zombie froze.

“So? Whaddya think?”

A woman was leaning around the door frame. As he noticed her, she slipped into the room. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing black suit slacks and a white button-down shirt. Her lips curved in an unsettling smile.

“I…what?” he whispered. He cut a glance back toward the zombie. It wasn’t moving.

She waggled something that looked like a small remote control. “I got a friend who figured out how to make these things. Zombie control collar. Pretty neat, huh?”

“What—why—”

“Don’t play dumb.” The smile vanished, and her gaze turned icy. Only for a moment, and then that sly amusement returned. He wasn’t sure which expression was more terrifying. “If somebody wanted to use the virus, something like this would be _real_ helpful. Don’t you think?”

He gulped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Who—who would want to use it? That’s crazy!”

“Mmhmm.” She prowled an arcing path across the room before pausing just behind the zombie and turning to face him. “Listen. I _know_ it’s not in the Portland lab anymore.”

Recognition clicked in him; he’d seen her face in the news. “You’re…that FBI agent.”

“Former FBI agent. I guess I saw a better opportunity. Me and my buddy here.” Smirking, she patted the zombie on the shoulder. It stood motionless, like a statue. “Now. Let’s make a deal.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t have the virus! I don’t know what happened to it!” The woman pushed a button—the green light went out, and the zombie surged forward. He screamed, screwing his eyes shut like it would do any good, like he was watching a horror movie instead of living it. Another buzz—and nothing had happened to him, there wasn’t any pain, he wasn’t bitten or dead. When he dared to pry one eye open, the zombie was closer. Much closer. It was almost within reach.

The woman stepped forward and planted her hands on the desk. “The FBI knows about the money.” When he gaped at her, she made a scoffing sound. “You think they wouldn’t find it? _Please_. They’ll be on you as soon as they have a warrant. Tomorrow morning at the latest.” It surprised him to feel his heart sink, when he’d thought there was nothing left inside him but stark terror. Everything was coming apart. _Everything_.

“So here’s how it goes,” the woman went on. “You tell me who you sold the virus to, and we’ll leave you to the mercy of the Feds.” She smiled that razor-edged smile again. “Or you don’t, and my friend here tears out your internal organs with his teeth.” The zombie stared at him, blank eyes and bloodstained, corpselike face. “Ever wanted to see your intestines up close and personal? Because that can happen.”

He’d be dead either way, that asshole would kill him, she might kill him once she had the information she wanted, _somebody_ was almost definitely going to kill him, but maybe there was some tiny hope, some desperate prayer of mercy. “No, _please_ ,” he begged, shaking, putting all his pleading into his eyes, his voice. “Please, I...I don’t know anything. I don’t. I swear!”

“M’kay,” she said with a shrug, and pressed the button.

The zombie lunged. Grabbing him by the shoulders, it slammed him up against the wall with brutal force. It leaned in close, close, and he felt as much as heard its growling moan, felt chill, damp breath against his throat, a breath that stank of metal and raw meat—

“ _Walter Greene, Walter Greene, Colonel Walter Greene!_ He was from the MRDC. I thought he was doing it for the government, I didn’t know, I didn’t know, oh god, please.”

The collar buzzed. No bite came, but the zombie didn’t release its grip. “Where is he now?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know!” he howled. “I swear, I swear I don’t, I don’t know anything else. P-Ple-ease!” Helpless sobs shook him; without that iron grasp holding him up, he would have collapsed.

The silent pause went on forever.

“You’d better be telling the truth,” the woman said at last. “Or we’ll be back. We _will_ find you.” The collar buzzed.

The zombie didn’t let go. Its fingers dug into his shoulders. He could feel the dull nails through his jacket.

“C’mon, buddy. Let’s go.” The collar buzzed again.

And a third time.

The zombie’s hands eased. They loosened, slipped away, and the zombie fell back a step, then another. Its lips were drawn back from its teeth, and its eyes, which had been empty and cold, were burning, fixed on his face. Then that blankness fell over it again. And as it turned to walk away, his legs gave out completely—he slid down the wall to the floor and huddled there, hot tears running down his face, wetness in his pants leg, the stink of shit and shame and oh god he was alive, he was alive, he was alive....

* * *

Eliot smacked his lips, then grimaced. “I gotta brush my teeth. This is disgusting.”

“ _Details, man, details,_ ” Hardison said over comms. Eliot could practically hear him grinning. “ _The success of a con is all in the details._ ”

“Tell me that when it’s _your_ turn to gargle with pig’s blood.” Couldn’t deny it had been a good effect, though. Smell was primal; it went right to a person’s subconscious, pushed buttons way below the level of rational thought.

Smell was also a pain in the ass when your mark got so scared he literally shit himself. Ugh.

“You got that?” Parker was saying. Her boot heels clicked crisply on the pavers, speed more important than silence as they cut through the parklike area behind the AdVitam offices. “Colonel Walter Greene?”

“ _I’m on it, baby. Got the search running already_.”

“OK. Arriving in three,” Parker said.

Movement, through the trees on their left.

A man came out of the shadows, gun raised and aimed. “ _Freeze!_ ” (Law enforcement training. FBI.) Instinct made him step out ahead of Parker, before he remembered what he looked like just then. The agent’s eyes widened. (A familiar agent.)

_Crack, crack, crack_ went the gun. (Glock 19M, 15 rounds, 12 remaining.) _Pfft, pfft_ —left-side abdomen just above the hip, upper chest to the left of the heart; third shot missed. He went down.

“Eliot!”

“ _Guys, what’s going on, was that—_ ”

“ _You_ shot _him!_ ”

“Hagen...? — _Don’t move!_ Stay where you are!”

“ _I’m coming, I’m on my way—_ ”

Hiss of fury from Parker, the _tak...tak_ of her boots, measured steps moving away from him. “What are you _doing_ here?”

“What are _you_ doing here?” Scrape of soles on pavement. Smell of gunpowder lingering. The man’s voice pitched high, anger and disbelief. “Damn it, _what_ is going on?”

He risked a glance up through his hair. The agent—McSweeten—was holding his gun on Parker. He flicked his glance and aim toward Eliot for an instant, then back to Parker. The man knew enough to be wary even with him on the ground from a chest shot but didn’t seem to realize he was alert. Parker’s eyes darted toward him; Eliot curled his fingers, slow and deliberate, and saw her register it. Focusing on McSweeten again, she eased over another step. Soon the agent would have to start turning his back on Eliot if he wanted to keep facing her.

“I don’t understand,” McSweeten was saying. “I know you, you’re a great agent. Why would you do this?”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Parker said, cold and angry.

As they spoke, Eliot gathered himself, muscle by muscle, visualizing how he would move. There was no pain—usually wasn’t, in those first adrenaline-soaked minutes (and never would be, now, for him)—but he could feel blood warm and sticky-wet beneath him. Depending on exactly where and how he was hit, he might not have much time. Quick and hard, then.

“Look, just tell me wh— _Stop_. Hagen, stop. You need to stop moving. I _will_ fire.”

The sound of a man who didn’t believe his own words. Still— _be careful, Parker._

There was a sudden shout, the rapid slapping of athletic shoes coming toward them. The agent half turned to look, then took one hand off the gun to activate his earpiece. “This is McSweeten, I need—”

—and Eliot came up off the ground. Four strides—the agent just starting to turn toward him—grab the gun hand, yank it back and down, forearm strike to the triceps. The elbow popped—the guy yelled, dropping the gun. Catch his shoulder while he was still off balance, jerk him up and around, hit to the face, hit to the face—get hold of his head and drive him down into a rising knee, up into his lowest ribs. The guy’s legs were already buckling—just an easy kick to send him sprawling, and then he lay there, groaning, no sign of even thinking about getting up again.

Huh. Not much to him. Not really a surprise, though.

And the gun— _click, thunk_ as Parker ejected the magazine and tossed it. He nodded to her.

Hardison skittered to a halt (having come running up on a gunman _like it wasn’t dangerous, dumbass_ ), his eyes wide and horrified. “Oh geez, oh damn, _E_ —”

“Don’t—” but Hardison wasn’t coming nearer, he’d finally gotten it through their thick heads not to try to touch him if he was injured. Hurray. “I’m a hot zone. Get the van ready. Go— _go_.”

“On it.” Hardison spun and sprinted back the way he’d come. Eliot took a moment to check himself. Not much blood, at least on his front: two small fresh patches among the larger dried ones of his disguise. From the way his shirt was sticking slightly in the back, there were exit wounds; they seemed equally small. He felt steady, no shock; he inhaled, and his breathing was easy. So far, okay.

Glancing back at where he’d been lying, he saw dark smudges of his blood. That was not so okay. “ _Eliot_ ,” Parker hissed at him as he strode toward the agent.

“Hey. Hey, _you_. McSweeten. Can you hear me?” The agent looked up blearily. His nose was bleeding heavily, possibly broken, and his face was beginning to swell. “Do not— _do not_ —touch any of my blood. When your backup gets here, have them call in a hazmat team. You got that?” He didn’t wait for an answer. Parker was gesturing urgently— _come on_ —and he turned to follow her.

“Are you dead?” Parker asked as they jogged toward where the van was parked.

“Nope.”

“Are you gonna die?”

“Probably not.” He actually was feeling way too fine for taking two bullets. It was kind of unsettling.

“But you went down,” Parker said, and there was a tremor in her voice. “You never go down.”

“I went down so he’d stop shooting at me.” He glanced over at her tense profile. “I’m _okay_ , Parker. You’ve seen me get hit before. It’s the same thing.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not _scary_ ,” she snapped. Speeding up, she pulled a couple of strides ahead of him, putting an end to the conversation.

They cut between buildings and reached the neighboring parking lot. The used van Hardison had bought stood with its rear doors open. Hardison had just finished laying down the drop cloth; he hopped out of the van as they approached, and Eliot jumped in, careful not to touch anything other than the cloth. Parker slammed the doors, she and Hardison got in, and they pulled out of the lot, Hardison driving easy and casual, like they were just another vehicle on the road.

“You okay, man?” Hardison asked, his gaze flicking up to the rearview mirror.

“I’m fine. Eyes on the road.” Hardison didn’t need to be watching him do first aid on himself. Shrugging off his jacket, Eliot folded it and stuffed it in the hazmat bag. He tested his shirt—while the blood was tacky, the cloth wasn’t stuck to the wounds, so he peeled it off carefully and bagged it as well. The lower wound had bled a little on the waistband of his jeans. He’d have to ditch those too eventually. “We’d better not get pulled over while I’m stripping.”

“Ooh, party in the back seat,” Hardison teased.

“Shut up.”

Taking a gauze pad from the kit, he blotted carefully at the wound on his abdomen. It was bleeding surprisingly little; he could get a quick look at it before applying pressure and then dressing it.

It...wasn’t bleeding at all.

There was blood _on_ him, but once the gauze had absorbed it, he could see that the bullet hole was already clotted up. Even when he dabbed a little harder, it stayed sealed. He stared at the spot, trying to wrap his head around this development.

“How’s it looking?” Hardison called from up front, more serious now, concerned.

No. Later. He’d worry about it later, back at the hotel.

“Not bad,” he said. Pulling a couple of wipes, he set to work meticulously cleaning every trace of blood off his skin so he could get dressed again. It was a strange color for fresh blood, not the usual bright crimson, more like a dark red wine.

He’d worry about that later, too.

* * *

Swiping condensation off the bathroom mirror, Eliot studied himself. Still too pale, still the creepy-ass eyes, but he looked less like a walking horror movie. Finally. Getting all the dried blood out of his hair had been a pain in the ass.

He’d taken the dressings off his wounds in the shower, and now he checked them again, front and back. They hadn’t come open, even when he’d cleaned them. In fact, they already looked more closed. He poked at one gingerly. It was a weird kind of healing, like it had skipped right past scabbing and inflammation to filling in the holes. The new flesh was a purple-red so dark it was almost black, and the edges of the wound were grayish. It was _really_ fucking weird.

He’d never heard of zombies having accelerated healing. If anything, they didn’t heal at all (and that had been a concern of his, way in the back of his mind—not only that it might interfere with his ability to fight, in addition to being just plain gross, but that it would freak Parker and Hardison right the hell out). Maybe that was a difference between live zombies and dead ones.

Actually, he was starting to think he agreed with Dr. Tran about not wanting to use the word _zombie_. Terrifying Meszaros had been useful, but that wasn’t what he wanted to be. Not that kind of monster. Not any kind of monster. Not anymore.

(Though he knew that on some level that he always would be, that he was soaked in death right down to the bones. He’d learned to live with that. Didn’t mean he had to wear it like a flag, out where anyone could see.)

And there’d been that moment, right up in Meszaros’s face, when he could have...when the man’s feverish smell and the panicked thunder of his heartbeat, the heat of him, all that soft animal flesh, had been so close, and the draw of the hunger so powerful he almost hadn’t heard Parker’s signal. It would’ve been easy. So easy. It would’ve been the end.

But he hadn’t. He was human. _He was_ _still human_.

Huffing a tired sigh, he looked toward the tub. He’d made sure to rinse away any traces of blood after his shower, but he still needed to disinfect it. He hated to do that to Parker, especially when she was already upset, but there was no choice. At least the smell wouldn’t carry to the other suite with the connecting door closed. As long as she stayed over there, it should be okay.

First, new dressings, partly to keep anything from getting into the still-healing wounds, and partly to hide them until he saw how they turned out. No need to disturb anyone else. Then clothes, then cleaning, and after that he could go and see what the others had got up to.

He really hoped they’d get to the end of this case soon.

* * *

“Parker,” Hardison said. Quiet. Gentle. “Babe. You don’t have to be in here.”

She didn’t, and she did. Even faint, the smell was all up in her nose and inside her head. She’d locked every muscle down tight, because if she didn’t keep the spring of herself compressed, she’d leap up and run, and the pattern would continue, and she’d just have to try again. If she _could_ try again. It wouldn’t be any easier the next time.

When you were small, sometimes the only defense was to make yourself even smaller. Slip into the cracks, behind the fixtures, up into the places they couldn’t go. And if you couldn’t hide, then run, run.

And if you couldn’t run, then bite.

Hardison took a careful step toward her, starting to reach out—

—“ _Don’t!_ ”—

He stopped because he was Hardison, and he knew. Pulling back, he gestured to the corner of the bed, keeping his movements small and slow. “Can I sit right here? I won’t touch you.”

She considered it, measured the distance, then jerked her head in a nod. He eased down; she felt the mattress shift. He was between her and the windows, but she still had a straight shot at two doors. She could get out.

But she wasn’t small anymore. And _I got you, girl_ , Hardison had said. How could she have _them_ , have their backs, if she ran?

She’d learned how to stop running, for them.

The water in the bathroom sink switched off, but the fan kept going. She stared down at the wavy pattern of the carpet. Her leg was vibrating, and when she made it stop, her hands wanted to smooth up and down her thighs. She kept her fingers curled tight against the bedspread.

She heard Eliot come out of the bathroom, felt him pause. He didn’t say anything. Instead, he walked toward her. Knelt down in front of her. She knew he was looking at her, but he didn’t try to catch her eyes. She stared down at his knees ( _found you, he said, gripping tight, dragging her out, thought you could hide from me_ ); he was wearing ( _dark-blue uniform pants_ ) old, faded sweatpants. Soft. Familiar. After a minute, he shifted from kneeling to sitting; it put him an inch closer to her. She could see his hands now, but they were relaxed, and she barely had time to twitch before she realized that.

She’d kissed those scars on his knuckles. It was an astonishing memory.

He breathed, calm, unhurried. She breathed, her breaths loosening a little, easing closer to his rhythm. Hardison breathed in as if he was about to say something, then didn’t. In that silent-together place, her fingers began to unclench.

When they uncurled, Eliot held out his hand. She couldn’t, quite. When she didn’t, he turned his hand so the back was toward her, his movements telegraphing his intention to reach out to her so obviously it could have been on a billboard. “Okay?” he asked. He gave her space to say no, then leaned forward. The backs of his fingers touched hers, rested there with just enough pressure that she was inside her skin, not shivery-crawling on the surface.

“We’re here,” he said. “ _You’re_ here, Parker. Nowhere else.”

She was.

She’d been holding her breath; it escaped her in a shudder. She closed her hand around his. His skin was cool, his grip strong but easy. She actually looked at him then, finally seeing more than a hovering presence. The dark eyes were a jolt, but then she came the last of the way into the now, and they made sense.

They reminded her of something else, though.

With the hand he wasn’t holding, she tugged up on his shirt. He hesitated, then let go and stood up. He pulled the tee shirt off and dropped it. Her eyes swept his torso: pale skin, scars she knew, two square patch dressings. She touched the edge of the lower one.

“No,” Eliot said, without heat or hardness. She put her arms around him instead, drew him nearer so she could rest her head against his stomach, feel him alive and whole and real.

Real, real, real. With her.

Something was missing. She reached toward Hardison; when he took her hand, she stood up, pulling him with her, until the three of them were pressed as close as possible, arms around each other, Eliot’s hand on her hip, hers flat against his shoulder blade, Hardison’s cupping her head.

“Love you,” Eliot said. Same words as at the hospital, but spoken, not silent. She could feel the vibration against her, hear the roughness in his voice.

And—“I love you,” Hardison murmured, his voice spilling over with feelings like diamonds poured out on velvet.

The bleach was never going to not be awful, it was a terrible smell, but now she’d have something new to remember with it. Something tender and relieving. Maybe someday she’d stop being afraid at all.

She tightened her hold on her boys.

“Love you. Love you both,” she whispered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, McSweeten....


	10. Chapter 10

The video call had just started when Eliot wandered into Hardison and Parker’s suite; Sophie was in the midst of gushing about the just-opened Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo and how amazing it was to see the complete collection of artifacts from King Tut’s tomb all in one place.

“I broke into the old museum once,” Parker commented, “but it was full of creepy dead guys.” She glanced over at Eliot. “No offense.”

“Still not dead,” he replied shortly. He’d been aiming for one of the chairs where he could sprawl in comfort, but Parker gave him big eyes and an urgent pout, so he sighed and changed course to where Parker and Hardison had left room for him on the couch.

“Eliot!” Sophie said. “You’re looking....” She paused, lips slightly parted as she considered him, and he quirked a mirthless smile at her.

“Like shit?”

“I was going to say surprisingly normal.” She sat back from the camera, giving him a better view of their surroundings. She and Nate were sitting in front of a window terrace, and beyond the balustrade the Great Pyramid jutted up in the distance, rising above the palm trees.

“Mena House?” he asked, and Sophie beamed at him. “Nice.” It was a gorgeous old hotel, with a lot of history. Too bad he hadn’t visited it under better circumstances. Maybe someday he’d be able to go back.

Maybe.

“So,” Nate said, leaning back and settling his arm behind Sophie. “Zombies.”

“We prefer to use the term ‘differently alive people,’ ” Hardison declared, all fake seriousness and sanctimonious dignity. Guy thought he was being _funny_.

“No, we _don’t._ ” Eliot pinned him with a warning glare, then turned back to the camera, shaking his hair out of his face. “They’re just _people_ ,” he said. The words were for everyone, but he kept his eyes fixed on Nate, and after a moment Nate gave a near imperceptible nod.

“So bring us up to date. How much of the news is true?” Nate asked.

Eliot listened as Parker and Hardison summed up the last few days, and as they spoke, passing the narrative back and forth between them, he watched Nate and Sophie’s reactions. He didn’t want to have to be wary of them—he probably didn’t _need_ to be, but if they decided he was too great of a risk....

Bad enough to have Vance looking to shut him down. The prospect of having the combined powers of Nathan Ford and Sophie Devereaux working against him was daunting.

Not to mention that Vance didn’t have hooks in his heart.

“So our next step is to track down this Colonel Greene,” Hardison concluded. “We know _who_ he is; we just haven’t located _where_ he is right now.”

“We sort of broke Meszaros,” Parker added. “And if he’s spilled to the FBI, they might have Greene already.”

“Or he’s on the run,” Eliot said.

Nate focused on him. “You think?”

He shrugged. “Could be. We don’t know what his plan is.”

“What’s a guy gonna do with a z—with a virus like this?” Hardison’s expression was tense; Eliot knew he was thinking about DC even before he said, “It could be Udell all over again, man, and that is _not_ gonna be pretty.”

Nate’s eyes had taken on the intense but distracted focus that meant his mind was off and running. “He could want to sell it. Or use it for blackmail.”

“Do you have a profile on him?” Sophie asked.

“Uh, yeah.” Hardison’s fingers twitched like he wanted to reach for the remote, but he was lacking his usual wall of screens. “So this guy’s part of the US Army’s Medical Research and Development Command. The MRDC’s in charge of creating and acquiring all kinds of biomedical materials—they’ve got their own research laboratories, but they also hire contractors and do cooperative development with outside people: scientists, research institutes, _and_ private industry. A couple of AdVitam’s subsidiaries have agreements with them; that’s probably how Meszaros knew him. Anyhow, the two of them made a deal for Greene to buy the virus under the table—for a _lot_ of money. And okay, maybe he really _was_ acquiring it for the MRDC, but the way Greene blew things up in Portland,” Hardison shook his head, “that don’t seem like how the army would handle things. On the other hand, it’s way more money than a guy like Greene should be able to pull together on his colonel’s salary. So if it ain’t the army—and I honestly don’t know whether I’d prefer it to be or not—then someone else is probably bankrolling him.”

“Any idea who?” Nate asked. “Any known connections or associates?”

“Still working on gathering data,” Hardison said. “Politically, he’s way over on the far right, so he’s buddies with lots of people who hate lots of _other_ people. Or there could be some kind of foreign tie-in. Russia, maybe. I haven’t narrowed it down to any particular candidates, though.”

Nate seemed about to say something else, and Sophie put a hand on his arm. “Do you need anything from us?” she asked. Nate looked briefly surprised, then subsided.

Parker thought for a few seconds, fingers tapping restlessly on her knee. “I think…we’re okay. Right now we’re just doing research, gathering information, and that’s all Hardison anyway.” Hardison gave her a small, warm smile. “Maybe later, if we need advice, we’ll call?”

Reminded that this wasn’t his crew or his job anymore, Nate had gotten himself reined in. He just tilted his head in acknowledgment, regarding Parker with quiet affection and pride. “Call or text anytime; we’ll be here if you need us. Or if you want a backup team on the inside at Fort Detrick, we can fly in.” He smirked sidelong at Sophie. “I can dust off the five-star general persona.”

Sophie huffed, amused, before turning to them again. “Well, we should let you get back to it. Call us! Keep us updated, so we don’t worry about you _too_ much.”

As everyone started saying goodbye and getting ready to sign off, a thought that had been simmering somewhere in the back of Eliot’s mind suddenly crystalized. “Hey, Sophie,” he broke in, “you got a couple more minutes?” Faintly surprised but curious, she resettled herself in her seat, Nate nodded to him once, then got up and walked out of frame; beside him, Parker and Hardison were vacating the couch. He didn’t really need the privacy for this conversation, but he found himself appreciating it anyway—less distractions. “You know that neuro thing you do?” he asked.

“Neuro-linguistic programming?”

“Yeah. Is there some way to resist that?” Her dark eyes studied him, and he swore he could feel her getting inside his head from more than seven thousand miles away. It raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

“The first step in NLP is establishing a rapport with the target,” she said. “Once that’s been done, there are all sorts of techniques that can be used to guide the other person toward a thought, a feeling, a course of action. So the best way to resist is just to avoid falling into that rapport in the first place. Does that help at all?”

Eliot grunted, dubious. It seemed too simple, and at the same time too vague. And this whole rapport thing? “I dunno. I just…wouldn’t’ve thought I’d be susceptible to something like that.”

Sophie’s smile was kind but knowing. “You’re actually far more open to other people than you think.”

“Eliot’s squishy!” Parker said as she collapsed on him in a drive-by hug from behind the couch.

“Parker, I—” But she’d already rolled off him and was halfway across the room, on her way to help Hardison with the brain work. Grumbling, Eliot turned back to the screen, where Sophie was poorly hiding a grin.

“You’re actually _very_ responsive when you’re not on guard,” she went on, her eyes bright with laughter. “The trick lies in catching you when you’re unguarded. We’re emotionally close, you trusted me, and we were in a safe place at the time. All of that made it easy.”

He scowled at her. “It was still a shitty thing to do. And I haven’t a hundred percent forgiven you. You don’t mess with a man’s free will like that.” Sophie never _had_ actually apologized, but he’d gotten past the point of really being mad about that a long time ago. Hackers gonna hack, hitters gonna hit, thieves gonna thieve, and grifters gonna grift. Same way Nate was always gonna…Nate.

Shaking off the distraction, he leaned forward and said, more quietly, “There’s this thing…Parker told you about how, in the hospital, I lost control, went all—” He crooked his fingers into claws; Sophie nodded. “It was like I got locked into Emilia, and she just—pulled me down. I couldn’t get loose from her. It happened so quick, and I might not’ve come back if Parker hadn’t gotten through to me.” His heart clenched itself up tight at the thought of what might have been, and he blew out a sharp breath, trying to release some of that tension. “If it happens again, the next time I come face to face with one of them, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I don’t know how to fight this.”

Sophie watched him gravely; he didn’t know what she was reading off him. Wasn’t sure if he wanted to know. He just stared her straight in the eyes, showing her plainly the evidence that he was different now, something not right.

But he was trying. God, he was trying.

“You cared about the girl,” she said at last.

“Woman. She wasn’t a kid—”

“You cared,” Sophie repeated, more firmly, and after a moment more of resistance, he slumped and looked aside. “You care and you give, because that’s who you are.”

He didn’t say anything; it made him uncomfortably self-conscious, having his personal inner stuff dragged out into the open and put into words like that, but at the same time it felt good to lean into her knowing him. Didn’t matter what of himself he poured out for other people, not many got in underneath his surface, and whatever games Sophie may have played in the past, he trusted her to read him right.

“I don’t want Eliot to stop caring,” Parker said from across the room. He hadn’t realized she was still listening.

“I don’t think Eliot should stop caring either,” Sophie agreed.

“Vote three for keeping the caring train rolling,” and Eliot turned around to glare uselessly at Hardison, who was sitting with his back to the couch, hand raised.

“This ain’t a _vote_ ,” he snapped. He faced about, transferring his glower to Sophie as he added, “If I gotta lock myself down e-emotionally or whatever to keep you guys _safe_ —”

“I don’t think that’s the answer,” Sophie said. “I’m not sure I _have_ an answer for you, really—this sounds like something on a completely different level from anything I do. But Eliot, if you don’t want to lose yourself up here,” she tapped her head, “ _especially_ if you don’t, you can’t lose yourself down here either.” She rested a hand on her heart. Her smile was complicated: a little ironic, a little wistful, a lot tender, the smile of someone who’d been in a similar place and learned a tough lesson from it. “It’s the same as any other fight, isn’t it? You can’t win if you’re also fighting yourself. You have to be just one person. You have to be... _you_.”

Dropping his gaze to his fingers, laced together in his lap, he turned her words over in his head, trying to puzzle everything out. Finally he sighed and glanced up again. “I ain’t sure I get all that.” He smiled faintly. “But thanks, Soph.”

“You can do this,” she said. “I have absolute faith in you. In all three of you.” She beamed at them, her expression warm and glowing. “Now get out there and go save the world. Again.”

“No pressure or anything,” Hardison called, but she’d already hung up.

* * *

_I’ve received word that Emilia is going to be transferred out to Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana. She’ll be leaving my care as soon as the airlift arrives, sometime in the next couple of hours. I understand why it’s being done, they have far better isolation and biosafety facilities than we do here, but it’s still frustrating. She’s my patient, she’s suffering,_ of course _I want to see it through to the end. It’s not my decision, though. (You win, Bob.)_

_Case report AH503-58245-53 will contain my final collection of data._

Alec sat back, one hand covering his mouth. “Aw, _damn_.” He hadn’t really thought about it, because there was no way it was actually going to happen (considering their Portland base was burned and done), but somewhere in the back of his mind he must’ve imagined that he’d see Emilia again, maybe a cured Emilia, or at least an Emilia with her condition managed, the way Eliot’s was. Now she was being sent away to some high-security government laboratory for isolation and study, and maybe they’d never let her out, ever. No new life for her, and no closure for anybody. Heartbreaking, was what it was. Just heartbreaking.

Sighing, he opened the case report file and started skimming through it, just in case there was any useful new information. Nope, same stats as always. Same....

Wait.

He scrolled back and started looking more closely at those vitals. They looked familiar, _damn_ familiar, but not...right.

These were _Eliot’s_ records.

There were definitely some shenanigans going on here. Unless the doctor had just copied the wrong set of data into the file? No, the blatantly obvious identifying info—name, gender, height and weight, etcetera—that was all Emilia. But the numbers, the appended scan data and graphs, those were Eliot’s. And unless someone was already very, very familiar with them, they’d never notice at a glance that something was off.

The file name started with “AH.” _Alec Hardison._ The file was meant for _him._

“It’s a message,” he muttered under his breath. “Gotta be. But what’s it saying?”

Bringing up his own compilation of data, he compared the two sets of information. Same, same, all the same. With a frustrated huff, he went back to scrolling through the new file, looking for patterns, but nothing jumped out at him. Codes? She wasn’t savvy enough to embed encrypted information in the document, was she?

No. No, probably not. Think more simply _._

“AH” stood for him. That was obvious. So why were there all those numbers in the file name? There were a damn lot of them, but what for? What kind of organization system needed so many numbers?

503, 503...that was a Portland area code. And the rest of the numbers, there were seven of them. Seven digits, broken up so they didn’t immediately look like a phone number. But they almost certainly were.

“Damn, lady, you are just full of surprises. You’re like a regular secret agent.” Grinning, he picked up his phone and dialed, then waited for someone to answer.

“Hello?” The woman’s voice sounded a little breathless, urgent.

“Dr. Tran—”

“ _Yesss!_ ” she hissed, and he started, wondering why she was mad at him, before he realized that was a mingled _yes, that is me_ and almost vicious triumph. “Wait—give me a minute.” She didn’t put him on mute, so he could hear a jumble of background noises, and then a thunk that might have been a door closing. “You got the message, then,” she said, low voiced.

“I got it. Good job with that. And this phone...?”

“It’s a burner. They looked at my phone, and I can only assume they put some kind of surveillance thing in it. Have they been calling you?”

“Oh, they tried a couple of times. Straight to voicemail jail, do not pass go.” And all their phones were hacked to be untraceable. Nobody was getting to them that way.

“Good.” A pause. “Emilia is already gone. They took her out last night.”

“I am really, truly sorry,” he said. “I was going to send Kenneth a plane ticket and some money for living expenses so he could get out there. Think they’ll let him see her?”

“They should. I think they will. They’re not bad people out there; I’ve met a few of them. Sujoy was on the analysis team, and....” She drew in a breath, as if to recenter herself. “Anyway. Thank you for that. I know he’ll appreciate it. But listen. That’s not the main reason I wanted to get in touch with you. Are the others there?”

“Yo, Eliot! Parker! Get on in here,” he called. As they came through from the other suite, he set the phone on the desk. “They’re here, and you’re on speaker.”

“Eliot. It’s Meredith. How’re you doing?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “No problems.”

“Good. I gave Emilia the brains.”

Eliot went from relatively relaxed to tense anticipation as he slid into the seat next to Alec. “And?”

“She spoke to me.” Alec, watching Eliot’s face, caught the flash of hope. “She’s...I don’t know whether it’s psychological stress or neurological damage or both, but she was very incoherent. I couldn’t get much from her. But...it brought her back, at least a little.”

Eliot’s shoulders slumped, and he bowed his head. “Thanks for letting me know,” he muttered.

“She knows what happened to her and to the other people at the lab. That much I can tell. She said a few things, maybe they’ll help you.” Dr. Tran listed off a few names, and oh hi, there you were, Colonel Greene. Nice to have confirmation from a second source. Someone named Mike “went,” although it wasn’t clear where. And finally: “Avispas.”

“What is that?” Parker wondered. “A place? A company?”

“A code name?” Eliot offered.

“I’m on it.” There weren’t a lot of hits to sort through, and the answer came quickly. “FOB Las Avispas. A Border Patrol forward operating base located in the ass-end of Arizona.” Border Patrol? Oh, he did _not_ like the implications of that. He started cross-checking against the background information he’d gathered on Greene. “No direct connection to the colonel, but some of the politicians he schmoozes with are rabidly anti-immigration.”

“Have you given the FBI this intel?” Eliot asked.

Her answer was immediate and straightforward. “No. I probably should, but no.”

Eliot’s brows drew down, his attention intently focused on the phone. “Why not?”

Her voice sharpened. “I don’t want to see this virus in the hands of _anyone_ who might use it. And it’s absolutely certain that the FBI won’t destroy it or the research. They’ll pass it along to other government agencies, and where’s it going to go from there? And that’s assuming they don’t screw up when they go in after it and trigger a release.” She snorted, making plain her opinion on law enforcement cowboys, then went on more calmly, “Don’t get me wrong, it’s better that they get hold of it than that guy does whatever he’s planning to do. But they literally could not stop you three from walking out of this hospital. That really doesn’t inspire much confidence. And...you know what this thing is. You’ve seen it in Emilia; you’ve experienced it yourselves, and you know intimately what it’s like. So you’re motivated in a way that no one else is.

“You people are thieves, right? Then I want you to steal those samples and all the associated data and make it disappear forever.”

Alec’s heart lifted; he could feel his smile stretch wide. “Yes, _ma’am_. Leverage International is on the case. Uh—” He glanced up at Parker, because he’d sort of gone all unilateral there, but she nodded at him, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“We’ll take care of it,” she said. “We can just burn the virus, right?”

“Yes—wait. How do you know—”

Parker shrugged, even though Dr. Tran couldn’t see them. “I mean, that’s what we did the last time we had to deal with a deadly biological weapon.”

“I...no, you know what, I don’t think I want to know about ‘the last time.’ Yes, you can burn it—as hot as you can get it, and don’t breathe in any fumes.”

“Okay, got it. We should get started,” Alec said. They had prep work to do, and Dr. Tran needed to get off the phone before someone caught her on it. “We’ll be in touch when it’s done,” he told her. “In the meantime, you stay out of trouble, y’hear?”

“I’m already in trouble.” She sounded equal parts amused and annoyed. “I didn’t get approval before dosing Emilia with that brain infusion.”

Alec chuckled, becoming more and more impressed as the conversation went on. “Better to ask for forgiveness than get permission, right?”

“I’m not asking for forgiveness. If it hadn’t worked, then yes, but you gave me enough evidence that I was willing to take the chance. And I was _right_. I’m not going to apologize to anyone for helping my patient.”

“You have a surprising gift for breaking the rules, Dr. Tran,” Alec said, grinning. “I totally approve. Hey, you ever want to join our little group of do-gooder criminals, we might have an opening for a doctor....”

“Thanks, but no thanks. Get going. Do your thing.” She hung up.

Alec had spent the last part of the conversation with his fingers tik-takking on the keys—being a master of multitasking and all—digging up more information about the Avispas base. “Okay, so this base is not in fact currently active. There was some kind of planning brouhaha—man, this is a tangled mess of interdepartmental infighting, mostly over funding. And then...huh. About a year ago, everything goes silent. I gotta dig more deeply, but just from this, the project seems to be in limbo.”

“So why would they have been talking about it?” Parker had been leaning over him, one hand gripping his shoulder; now she pushed herself away, pacing a couple of steps in a whole-body fidget as she thought. “What does an unfinished base have to do with the virus?”

“Maybe they’ve built something else there,” Eliot said. “It’d sure be isolated.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Alec muttered as he studied the satellite map. “I mean, if you wanted to put a zombie farm way out where no one would stumble over it....”

Parker’s head whipped around as she stared at him. “Do you think that’s what he’s doing?”

“Girl, I ain’t an evil military mad scientist type, I got no idea _what_ he’s doing. But if I was, then this might possibly seem like a good idea.”

She pursed her lips, not looking happy at all. “I guess we need to go out there to check it out. And hope that it’s not a false lead.”

Alec was already looking up distances and travel times. “Okay, so, it’s a bit over an hour out from Tucson. Which makes it...about a thirteen-hour drive.”

They all looked at each other.

“Oh lord have mercy.”

“I gotta be honest, man, I don’t think I can face that again.”

“ _No._ ”

“We’re gonna have to fly, then,” Alec sighed. He started looking into the ticket situation.

“How’re we gonna fly?” Shoving himself out of his chair, Eliot stalked across the room, then whirled back around, pointing at himself. “I mean, totally aside from the fact that we’ve got the FBI hunting us, you think people aren’t going to notice something’s wrong with me? The zombie crap is all over the news. And then shut me up in a tin can with a couple hundred people, and....” He faltered—he was scared behind the angry front, Alec realized, and not of being caught, not even of getting shot, maybe killed. Eliot only got that frightened when he thought that Alec and Parker might get hurt. Or that he might be responsible for something truly terrible. Moreau levels of terrible.

“You’re okay,” Alec said, keeping it gentle and assured. He turned in his chair so he was facing Eliot fully. “You’d be okay. You’re on top of this thing. We’ll just feed you up before we go. And it’ll only be a couple of hours. You got this, man.”

Eliot didn’t look convinced. But he visibly steeled himself, set his jaw, and nodded.

Alec turned back to his laptop. “And with the appearance thing, I’m on that. Been figuring out solutions. Parker, the, the—” He flapped his hand at the dresser top, where Parker had come to roost. She picked up the little package and tossed it to Eliot. “Opaque, full-coverage contacts. Best part, they’re sport tint lenses with sun protection. You still might want to wear sunglasses outside, in strong sun, but these’ll help.”

“Huh,” Eliot said, which would be a disappointing reaction from anyone else, but Alec had had plenty of practice in interpreting Eliot’s monosyllables, and the tone of this particular one meant _this is pretty cool and actually really useful, so thanks._

“You’re welcome. We can handle the skin thing too; don’t worry about that. Right now, let’s all focus on how we’re going to get the three of us through TSA and onto a plane without drawing undue attention.”

Parker slid off the dresser and came back over to drape herself around him, more settled now that they had a concrete plan to work out. “You’d actually make a pretty great mad scientist,” she told him.

Alec blinked. “Uh...thanks?” He’d missed a link in the thought process chain somewhere. “Wait, so what makes you say that?”

She hummed, and he felt her smile as she kissed his ear. “You’d be really good at the whole evil monologue thing.”

“ _What?_ Is that—but what about the _science_? Girl, you cannot deny it, I would do the most amazing, brilliant weird science this world has ever seen.” She patted him on the cheek, then slid away from him, smirking. He twisted around to face her, increasingly offended. “Hey. _Hey._ Do _not_ discount my scientific genius. And I would _not_ monologue, I would _never_ monologue.”

“Monologuing right now,” Eliot said, pointing at Alec with entirely unnecessary sass as he walked away. Alec glared after him but managed to hold onto his train of thought and kept right on going.

“That is, like, the number one rule of survival for evil scientists,” he insisted, “not that I would be evil, really, just slightly morally challenged, kinda like now, but— Listen, when the forces of law and order, okay, the _opposition,_ are in your hands, under your thumb, you do _not_ stand around yapping and give them time to come up with a way to foil your plans. That is Evil Overlord 101.”

“I thought you weren’t going to be evil,” Parker called as she started sorting through her stuff, presumably getting ready to start packing. “Also, you’re really proving my whole point about the monologuing.”

“Oh yeah? _Oh yeah?_ Monologuing,” he muttered as he turned back to the keyboard. “Insulting my science skills, my genius intelligence...I’ll show you evil. I’m’a put you both in the tiniest economy seats in the back, right next to the bathroom. Mwahaha.”

“Mwahaha,” Parker echoed back at him, and it was entirely unfair that she made it sound twice as diabolical.

* * *

Thank fucking god for PreCheck. The main TSA line was ridiculous, winding back through no less than eight turns; standing in that tight-packed crowd for anywhere between half an hour and an hour would have been a nightmare. This way, he only had to wait on a handful of people, and then he was in front of the agent.

He mentally checked his appearance. Neat button-down and chinos, sneakers and windbreaker. Hair slicked back in a ponytail. Expression bright and open and friendly. Think boy scout, think eager, earnest, slightly naive, totally nonthreatening. The contacts made his eyes a weird amber-tinted grayish color, but he had a defined iris and pupil, and the glasses he was wearing would distract from them anyway. All he had to do was remember not to scratch at his face or pick at his hands.

If Hardison ever decided to get out of the game, there were probably at least a hundred other careers he could take on. FX makeup was definitely one of them.

The agent handed back his ID, and he smiled at her. “Thank you, ma’am. You have a good day, now.” She didn’t smile back, but she nodded civilly enough, and he cleared out from in front of her. PreCheck meant he didn’t have to take off his shoes, so he blew through the X-ray conveyor belt area and scanner, past the area with benches where people were getting their stuff back together, and out into the terminal, which was...

Busy. _Really_ busy.

There were a lot of people—not so many as to get into his personal space, nobody was being crowded or jostled, but a steady flow surrounded him, individuals and groups of different sizes passing on all sides. And he never got disoriented in situations like this—would’ve been dead a long time ago if he did—but the movement, _so much movement_ , the thundering of hundreds of living bodies, blazing like fire. A couple of kids raced by him, a burst of more intense energy, and he found that he’d turned to watch them, drawn, half mesmerized. The second he realized what he’d done, he jerked around, started striding stiffly in the other direction. Didn’t matter where his gate was; he’d find it eventually. Just then he needed some space to get his head back together.

Finding an empty spot of wall, he leaned back into its solidity and closed his eyes, trying to shut out all the hubbub. But he could still hear the people, still _feel_ them, ebbing and flowing, near and far, but always, always present. So loud. So hot inside his head. He was getting staticky at the edges, couldn’t center himself.

Breathe. Fucking breathe. He opened his eyes again, because closing them wasn’t helping. Too much, too many, god, so many, and he wanted—

Shoving away from the wall, he walked fast for the nearest restroom. Not much improvement—a lot fewer people, but much closer quarters—but there were stalls, and he shut himself into one. The walls blocked the hum a little. He pressed himself against the door like he could blockade it against himself. “Hardison,” he muttered to the comm. “Trouble.”

“ _What is it? Where you at?_ ”

“Restroom. I can’t—” He swallowed hard. Felt like he was strangling on tension. “Can’t do this. ’S too much.”

“ _Yes, you can, I know you can._ ”

“ _Hardison!_ ” he hissed. “Listen to me. Even if...even if I make it through the terminal to the gate—and I’m not sure I can—I’m gonna be stuck elbow to elbow with strangers for _two hours_.” Just the thought of it was agonizing. How much it would hurt. How terrible things would be if he couldn’t hold on. “I knew this was a bad idea. I’ll drive it, meet you there.”

“ _We’ll lose half a day,_ ” Parker protested.

“Better that than I lose my mind on the plane! Jesus, Parker.”

“ _What if we’re with you? Will that help?_ ”

“No! I don’t know!” Maybe? Parker had brought him back once, and Hardison once before that. They might be the anchor he needed. But if not...and then there was the issue of being wanted criminals trying to slip by under the radar. “We’re supposed to be traveling separately, remember? Hardison’s in another section, and you’re on a different flight.”

“ _I’m hacking into the system now_ ,” Hardison said. “ _I’ll switch seats so I’m next to you._ ”

“ _Switch me too,_ ” Parker said.

“ _Parker, you’re already on your plane._ ”

“ _In a couple of minutes I won’t be._ ”

This was a disaster.

“ _Eliot, listen to me, listen. Follow my voice. How’re you feeling right now?_ ”

Hardison’s voice was firm, steady. A little tense, but overall stupidly calm. He made himself lean into it, finally got in a deep breath, and checked in with himself. “Better. Some.” He was still hyperaware of the people outside his stall, but not stuck on them.

“ _Okay. Hang out in there for a few. I’m getting things set up._ ”

Maybe he was losing his marbles, because suddenly he had to fight down the urge to laugh. Hiding out in a bathroom stall so he didn’t go on a rampage trying to eat people while waiting on a superhacker to juggle airplane seats around to accommodate him. How had this become his life?

“Still think I should drive,” he murmured. He couldn’t help smiling at the ridiculousness of it all, but nobody would see him anyway.

“ ’ _Scuse me!_ ” Parker chirped to someone off comms, at something like a dog whistle pitch, then went on in a normal tone, “ _You couldn’t drive it nonstop, and what if something happened when you got out to take a break? We’d worry about you. This is better. Trust us. We won’t let you fall._ ”

Of course he trusted them. Of course. It was himself he didn’t trust, not with all this new and terrifying weirdness inside his head. But…he’d taken a long, hard road to learn control, to hold back his temper and his red rage and the violence that came too easily. To keep the killer in him down. What of all that, if not for this?

For them. _For them._

“Stay with me, then,” he said hoarsely. It was part surrender, part plea. He’d never admitted to needing someone so desperately in all his life. “But if I say go, then get away. Get as far away from me as you can. Promise.”

“ _We got you, man,_ ” Hardison said, soft in his ear. He didn’t know if it meant _we hear you_ or _we’re holding on to you_. Probably both.

Damn fool precious idiots.

“ _Okay,_ ” Hardison announced after a few more moments, “ _three adjacent seats, premium economy, first row, so no one directly in front._ ”

“ _What happened to the people who were sitting there?_ ” Parker wondered.

“ _Flight’s full, they ended up on standby. Too bad, so sad. They’ll live. Eliot, when you’re ready, gate 26, there’s a premium lounge, not too many people there. Do you need me to escort?_ ”

He visualized the terminal, tested his steadiness. Not far, and he was feeling okayish now. “I can make it.”

“ _Okay. See you there._ ”

He flushed the toilet, then went out to the sink farthest away from anyone and faked washing his hands. Nerves calm. No tremors. He had this. He walked back out into the terminal, keeping his attention tightly focused on himself, even though it went against every one of his instincts. (No, really, he could walk two minutes down the concourse of SFO without getting picked off by a sniper.) There was the gate, and the lounge, and Hardison already sitting there, leaning forward with elbows on knees as he twiddled away on his phone. He wore a high-end off-the-rack suit, immaculately polished shoes, dark shades, and neat, tight dreads, with a headband to help cover up the edge of the wig. Bad luck that Agent Thomas had been definitively IDed as Agent Hagen’s accomplice, so now both Hardison and Parker’s faces were known, but at least there weren’t any photos of _him_ , only descriptions.

(He’d seen the crime artist’s latest sketch, made after their encounter with McSweeten. It was terrible.)

“ _Check-in desk,_ ” Hardison murmured, and he aimed himself that way, somehow held onto the still core of himself while the angry woman in front of him ranted at the attendant. (Seemed like she was one of the people Hardison’d bumped. Whoops.) She finally stalked away, and it was his turn; he smiled, exchanged pleasantries, smiled some more, got his new boarding pass, and didn’t exactly flee but definitely staged a strategic retreat to the premium area. He didn’t sit—someone might come along and sit down next to him. Instead he stood near Hardison, not so close that it might seem like they were together, but close enough that he could... _smell_ him. And he didn’t know why that was a surprise when he was constantly aware of the wash of mingled scents surrounding him, could tell which person passing by had eaten a fish taco recently and who had something stronger-proof than coffee in their travel mug.

Maybe because…it was home.

He breathed it in, and he was back to that morning after...god, had it only been five days since it happened? He was back in the bed they shared, enfolded in the life they’d made together. He was holding and being held in the hotel suite, their hands on his shower-damp skin. All it needed to be right was.... “Parker?” he whispered.

“ _Soon,_ ” she said. “ _I see you. I’ll board after you guys._ ”

He didn’t see _her_ , but that was normal. He focused on what he did have hold of: Hardison’s warm, layered scent, his nearness, just a few steps away, the web of connection over their comms, Parker somewhere watching out for all three of them. The trust.

Elite flyers were being called, then business class. “ _You go first,_ ” Hardison said, and he drifted toward the gate, knowing Hardison would be behind him, and then Parker behind Hardison. The boarding line had people standing closer to him than was maybe safe, but he was in some kind of zone, and for the minute or two before he got to the skyway, they were no more than an itch in his brain, a low burn, just enough that he was aware of them. Then he was free and walking alone down the tunnel; he was nodding to the flight attendants as he boarded the plane; he was finding his row and settling in. He’d just straightened up from stuffing his backpack under the seat when Hardison arrived. “Excuse me, friend,” Hardison said, “mind if I take the aisle seat? I’d really ’preciate it.”

He _never_ took an inside seat. Never let himself get boxed in. But this wasn’t a normal situation, and he figured being boxed in was the point. Forcing back his automatic scowl, he plastered a smile over top of it. “Sure, man,” he said, shifting to the middle. “No problem.” Hardison ostentatiously made himself comfortable, leaving the seat arm up so they came into light contact as he shifted around.

“Excuse me, hi, coming through!” Parker trilled, appearing out of nowhere with a flounce. Her outfit was what Hardison called “naughty schoolgirl with anime stylings,” which included a blazerlike jacket and short, flippy skirt paired with white stockings, chunky platform shoes, a lacey top, and pink and blue streaks in her randomly pigtailed hair. She clambered over them both to reach the window seat, which was totally unnecessary, given the extra leg room in their row, but apparently this was some manic pixie whatever bullshit. It was a loud disguise—Hardison’s idea, of course, big surprise there—but it took several years off her age and looked nothing at all like the sleek, professional Agent Hagen. (Hardison had wanted her to wear some kind of “dazzle” makeup, too, which he said could defeat facial recognition software, but Parker had nixed that as being too attention-getting. Thank god for Parker.) At the very least, more people would be staring at her legs and ass or at her hair than at her face.

And for sure the three of them didn’t look like people who would be traveling together. It made him a little easier about having them all in one place.

The plane was filling up as the regular economy passengers got on. Their presences overlapped each other, merging into a pulse like a throbbing heart—

—and Parker slung herself sideways against him, mashing their shoulders together. When he glanced down at her, startled, she thrust a snack package toward him. It was a pink box full of something that called itself strawberry Pocky and looked like candy-coated sticks. Keeping in character, he gave her an awkward smile, a head shake, and a raised _no thank you_ hand.

She didn’t stop leaning on him, but the pink box vanished, and a red one appeared, like magic. It was also Pocky, but apparently chocolate-covered. He drew breath to speak, and she shook the box aggressively, eyes locked on his face. Defeated, he took a couple of the sticks while trying to communicate via a covert glare that she should knock it off already. She beamed, shameless, stuffed several sticks in her own mouth, and sat up, shifting back over into her seat.

Hardison was asking a flight attendant for a blanket. When it arrived a few minutes later, he made a big show out of shaking it out and settling it over himself, readjusting several times with elbows all everywhere, including into Eliot’s space. Eliot jammed his own elbow into Hardison’s side in warning, and he subsided.

Meantime, Parker had gotten up onto her knees to play with the overhead controls. She’d turned one of the fans toward herself and was letting it blow into her face as she loomed over him, smiling blissfully.

He was going to kill them. Or maybe just stuff _them_ under the seats. What the _hell_ — One of the attendants was coming down the aisle, checking compartments and seats, and he forced his face into something that he hoped wasn’t angry.

Boy scout. _Boy. Scout._

Parker flopped back down into her seat. Hardison wriggled, fluffing the blanket so it fell partly over Eliot’s leg. He sat there trying not to think murder thoughts.

Emergency procedures speech, blah, blah. The people in those videos were never going to sound natural and unforced. As the plane started rolling toward takeoff, Parker tilted over onto him again and immediately began to snore in his ear. On his other side, Hardison slouched down further, head drooping toward him. An attendant on the way to his seat paused to glance down at them; he met Eliot’s eyes and smirked.

Ha ha. Yes, these assholes were adorable. Still holding character somehow, Eliot gave him a weak, slightly terrorized smile and a mental middle finger.

But as the plane turned and taxied through the maze of runways, he found himself settling in spite of himself, his irritation gradually fading. He breathed the last of it out and consciously let it go, let himself sink into the lack of personal space. After all, it was familiar. Comfortable. Parker was lithe and relaxed against him, maybe asleep and maybe not. Hardison was definitely not asleep—his hand slipped over Eliot’s leg, briefly alarming him; he stole Eliot’s hand and drew it under the edge of the blanket, lacing their fingers together.

They were with him. They surrounded him with the world that belonged to the three of them, with their bodies, warm, thrumming, and alive, with their affection and their crazy and their love.

Deep in their presence, he closed his eyes and let them hold him there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've stayed at [Mena House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriott_Mena_House_Hotel). It's super gorgeous. ^_^


	11. Chapter 11

Alec had never empathized with Luke Skywalker so hard in his entire life.

The desert was a terrible, terrible place.

Now, Las Vegas—Las Vegas was different, it was _in_ the desert but nobody _cared_ because you all were inside with the AC on all the time and there were interesting things to see and do (and the Star Trek Experience had been dope, it was a crying shame it had been shut down, and maybe he should put getting it reopened on his list of things to accomplish in life).

Anyway. Las Vegas hardly even counted as desert.

Whereas here, the last town they’d been through had had one store. One. Which was also a gas station. And a bar.

( _“So, just like a rest area on the highway,” Parker said._

_“No, it is not—it is nothing like a rest area, at a rest area you got your Starbucks, you got your fast food, you got your convenience store with travel items and phone charger cables and eighty-six different kinds of snacks. Here they got bullets, booze, and ‘Where the heck is Las Avispas?’ tee-shirts.”_ )

It was worse than Tatooine because there weren’t even aesthetically pleasing giant wind-sculpted sand dunes. There was just dirt and rocks and prickly little trees and cactuses and more dirt and more rocks. And probably rattlesnakes. Definitely rattlesnakes.

And don’t even get him started about the whole “dry heat” thing.

“Hardison, would you quit muttering to yourself,” Eliot growled. “And drink some water. You’re gonna get dehydrated.”

To add insult on top of injury, Eliot had replaced all his soda with bottles of water. He was a goddamn ninja soda rustler, was what. And that just was _not_ a thing one should do to a brother. It was dishonorable. It was—

“Get up here, Hardison,” Parker said. She sounded fierce, and he wasn’t sure if she was tetchy with him or just hyperfocused on their target. Grumbling, he straightened from where he’d been hunched over, hands on knees, and slogged up the last stretch of hill to where the other two were crouched behind some boulders, looking down on whatever was below.

“Rattlesnakes,” he muttered as he reached them. “I’m telling you, if I get bit—”

“Rattlesnake’ll warn you before you step on it; that’s why they’re called rattlesnakes,” Eliot said. “Just keep away from it, you’ll be fine.”

“Just keep away from it. Right, sure, like I’m gonna walk up and be all like, hey, how you doing, Mr. Snake.” He inspected the ground minutely for anything nasty and bitey before hunkering down next to Eliot and studying the scene below.

Well. That was quite an installation down there. “So much for being in limbo,” he said. “Looks like somebody got around the funding issue.”

“That ain’t no FOB.” Eliot was scanning the site, binoculars jammed up against his sunglasses. “Too big, too much dug-in infrastructure, especially for a place way the hell out here. Looks like a full utility plant—see, there—vehicle depot, barracks...warehouses? This is some kind of major facility.”

“It looks like a prison,” Parker said.

Trust Parker to come right at the heart of things. It did, in fact, look like some weird amalgamation of prison, storage facility, and military base.

“This is what I was afraid of, seeing where this place was located,” Alec said. “We’re a mile from the Mexican border, maybe less. You round some people up, put ’em in a place like this—no one knows, no one cares.”

“How many people would actually try to come through here, though?” Parker wondered. “It’s just desert for miles. There’s nowhere to go.”

“Altar Valley.” He had the map in his head, along with all the rest of his background research. “That’s where we are now. This whole area is a major throughway for drug smugglers and human traffickers. The security around the major crossing points is too heavy, so they come out here. Hundreds of miles of border, with just a few handfuls of agents trying to cover it all. Right here, they make the crossing and it’s a straight shot up to Tucson. Somebody drives down to pick them up, they’re in the city in a little over an hour.” He frowned. “But what were the people who built this thinking, man, what did they plan to do with all the people they caught? Keep them here...but for how long? Holding them forever would be crazy expensive.”

“Maybe some kind of work program? Lots of prisons use inmates for labor.” Eliot gestured to a spot on the other side of the complex where huge, shallow holes and heaps of dirt showed that something was still under construction, although the earth movers were motionless, and no one seemed to be around. “Could be a factory, maybe?”

“But now there are zombies,” Parker said. She looked at Alec, eyes inscrutable behind her dark shades. “Zombie farm?”

“I mean, not the original plan for this place, obviously, considering how long it’s been in the works. But now?” Studying the layout again, he thought about how many people a facility like this could probably hold and shuddered inwardly. “I could see it happening. Still don’t know what they’re going to _do_ with all those zombies, though.”

Eliot grunted, paused as though he was about to say something, and then stayed paused. On his other side, Parker went tense.

“Hey. You up there,” a voice called from behind and below them. “You all want to turn around real slow, hands where I can see them.”

Oh, well, _crap_. He followed the directions—they all did, Eliot laying down the binoculars with exaggerated care. Two men in fatigues were standing near the bottom of the slope. Both were carrying assault rifles, though only one was actually aiming at them; the other had his rifle in hand but held at ease, down at his side. He might be overconfident, or he might be acting casual in the same way that Eliot sometimes did just before he delivered a sudden, unexpectedly vicious beatdown. Alec was not about to take a chance on underestimating the man.

“Come on down, now,” that guy said, all bland and unconcerned, and they started down. As they got closer, Alec got a better look at the two of them. Mr. Laid-back was older, maybe in his fifties, and heavyset, his brown, seamed face shadowed by his camo hat. The other man looked to be early twenties, taller and lean, with very black wavy hair, dark eyes, and a face that was just a bit too horsey to be movie star good-looking. “Mind telling me what you were doing up there?”

“We was just hiking, man,” Alec said promptly. “Just drove out here for a day or two, been enjoying the local scenery—”

“Doing some bird watching?” the older man asked.

“Yeah, we, uh....” Wait, were there even birds out here in the middle of God-forsaken nowhere? As he paused, the young guy snorted.

“You’re Shadow Wolves,” Eliot said, breaking the awkward moment, and...say what? That was an actual thing in the real world? It sounded like something out of a homebrew D&D campaign. The older man pushed his hat back a little, brows lifting, though the rest of his face stayed impassive. “I met a couple of your guys in Uzbekistan. Tony Red Bow?”

“Yeah, Tony quit the Patrol a few years back, went home to Pine Ridge.” The man’s gaze sharpened as he focused in on Eliot. “What service?”

“Army, Special Forces.” The atmosphere had definitely changed, the two of them facing each other down like they were establishing Eliot’s credentials through some form of manly staring contest. Seriously, military guys were just plain _weird_.

“Still in?” the man said softly.

“Nah, I left years ago.” Eliot shrugged, then surprisingly volunteered, answering a question that hadn’t been asked yet, “Been around. Did this and that.”

“Uh huh.” After a few more moments’ scrutiny, the man made a subtle gesture that must’ve meant _stand down_ , because the younger guy cut a surprised glance at him, then lowered his rifle, scowling. “Name’s Dan. Dan Lopez. This here’s Jake Anquoe.”

Alec wondered if the man caught Eliot’s split second hesitation. “Eliot Spencer,” he said, and it seemed like his reputation hadn’t preceded him here, at least, because nobody reacted with shock and awe. He broke gaze finally to turn and nod toward the two of them. “Hardison. And that’s Parker.”

“All right,” Dan said. “How about we find some shade, and then you can tell me why you’re _really_ out here.”

As they followed him down the hill, with Jake bringing up the rear and still not looking at all okay with them, Alec caught at Eliot’s sleeve and hiss-whispered, “Shadow Wolves?”

“They’re an all-Native unit of the Border Patrol. Best trackers anywhere. They get sent out to teach other countries’ border guards how to follow sign. That’s how I met them overseas. I didn’t have time to stay and take their training course, but I saw a little of it. Good stuff.”

“You flatter us,” Dan called back over his shoulder, sounding dryly amused.

They ended up back where they’d parked their Wrangler, near a clump of short, scraggly trees. A dusty white pickup with Border Patrol markings had pulled up behind them. Eliot took a detour to their car for some more water bottles and threw one to Alec with a pointed look. Alec glared at him.

Under the trees, Dan settled onto a rock and cleared his throat. “So. What’s your story?”

“What do you know about that place?” Parker asked, turning the questioning back on him. Alec was more than happy to leave the discussion to her for the moment; finding the least uncomfortable-looking rock, he checked it for snakes, dusted it off, and sat down gingerly.

“It’s a fiasco, is what it is,” Jake said. Funnily enough, he had the same accent as Eliot. “And it’s shady as all hell.”

“It _was_ going to be some kind of Patrol complex,” Dan said. “What it is now....” He shrugged.

“That’s what we want to know,” Eliot put in. He was leaning up against one of the larger, less gnarled trees, arms crossed. “We’re checking it out.”

Dan’s gaze swept them all, slow and measuring. This was definitely a guy who was not easy to bullshit. “Who’re you with?”

“We’re private investigators,” Parker said. “It ties into a case we’re working on.”

Dan gave her a small smile. “Going to need a little more than that.”

“Why are _you_ here?” Eliot said. “I didn’t think this was reservation land.”

“Technically all this land is ours,” Jake said with a cutting, unfriendly smirk. With the shades on, Alec couldn’t tell if Eliot glanced sidelong at him or not. All his attention seemed to be focused on Dan, but Alec had no doubt that he was one hundred percent aware of where the other agent was and what he was doing, and also that the rifle would make absolutely no difference if Eliot decided he had a sudden need to take Jake down.

Settling back like he was sitting in a comfy chair instead of on a hard, mercilessly unforgiving rock, Dan nodded, and Alec hadn’t realized just how guarded the man had been until he relaxed his posture. Damn, between the shrewdness and the lack of tells, he would not want to try to con this man ever. “You’re right. This isn’t our patrol area. We lost a couple of people yesterday, and we’re out looking for them. Now, it’s your turn.”

The three of them exchanged glances. Eliot dipped his head in the least little nod, which in Eliot-speak meant _whatever happens, I can handle it_. Parker looked significantly at Alec, so apparently he was supposed to provide the exposition, which, admittedly, _was_ a specialty of his. Pushing his discomfort to the back of his mind—swear to God, he had never sweated so much in his entire life—he drew a deep breath and got his thoughts into order. “Okay. So. You know about Portland?”

“Hmm,” Dan mused. “Isn’t it that city up in the Northwest with all the rain? I hear they have whales up there.”

Alec faltered, his mouth hanging open, then quickly revised his presentation. “No—I mean, yes, that is the city, but what I’m talking about is—”

Chuckling, Dan waved him off. “Relax, son. Of course we know the latest news. We do get TV out here. Wonder of wonders, we even have the Internet.”

Oh great. Awesome. Here he was in the middle of the desert, getting trolled. Holding onto his dignity firmly, he said, “So then you know about the virus. What you probably _don’t_ know is that some of it has gone missing. And we have a strong lead pointing to that facility.”

Dan’s face had gone stoic again as he listened, but this time Alec caught the subtle strain in his expression, a glimmer of alarm in his eyes. Jake on the other hand was staring at them with blatant outrage, like they’d just offered him a bag of disgusting crawling things. “Are you kidding? Why the fuck—”

“Language,” Dan said.

“—why the hell would someone bring that out here? What—” He froze, eyes widening. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.” Taking off his hat, Dan ran his hand over his thinning iron gray hair, drawn back into a ponytail longer than Eliot’s. “If what you’re saying is true...if that stuff is in there...this is bad.”

“Hello, understatement,” Alec muttered.

Jake was a lot less restrained. “They’re gonna what—test it out here? _Make_ it?” His face twisted up like it couldn’t decide between anger and horror. “If they want to use people for guinea pigs—all the UDAs coming through here are expendable. _Our people_ are expendable.” He turned on Dan, half glaring, half pleading. “We have to do something!”

Dan fixed his gaze on Alec. “Who’s behind this, do you know?”

“A Colonel Greene?” Dan didn’t show any recognition, so Alec went on. “He works for one of the Army’s medical research departments. Or worked—he probably ain’t going back now. Looks like he might have ties to the people behind the construction here. When he got his hands on the stuff, it was a ready-made place he could go.”

“Hmm,” Dan murmured. “So now the grand prize–winning question is, what are _your_ intentions here?” With a start, Jake snapped his carbine back up into firing position, as if suddenly remembering that no, they had not yet been confirmed as good guys. Less obviously, Dan had shifted his hand on the stock of the rifle across his lap, resettling it closer to the trigger. “You still haven’t said who you’re working for. Or what you plan to do once you’ve finished investigating this place.”

Alec glanced at Parker again, and she scrunched up her face. Not the most articulate answer, but her distaste was pretty eloquent all by itself. Turning back to Dan, he braced himself for the worst and hoped for the best. “If you know about Portland, then you probably already have a pretty good idea of who we are. I’m’a get that elephant out of the middle of the room right now, okay?” Jake twitched, staring at them in shock as the dots suddenly connected for him, while Dan just gave a slow nod, eyes half lidded. “We’re not with the law, but we’re working for someone who wants to see that virus destroyed and never used on anyone, ever again.”

“Uh huh,” Dan said. “And how are you—”

“We’re thieves,” Parker said flat out, cutting him off. “Greene stole that virus. We’re going to steal it back.”

Dan stared at her, then huffed out a breath, chuckled long and low before shaking his head. “You guys....” He refocused his attention on Eliot, that amusement fading into seriousness. “Let me see your eyes.”

Eliot pushed his sunglasses up onto his head. He was wearing the contacts, so his eyes looked human, if a little weird. Dan stared at Eliot for a long time, while Eliot returned his gaze without faltering. Alec didn’t know what the man was even looking for, but at last he seemed to come to a decision.

“You were straight with us. That counts for something.” He raised his eyebrows at Eliot. “You going to go berserk and try to eat our faces off?”

“I don’t intend to,” Eliot said. “Can’t swear that it won’t happen, but if it does, it won’t be ’cause I didn’t fight it.”

Jake looked incredulous, and also like he was regretting any number of life choices. “Dan, you’re not seriously gonna trust them! They’re fugitives! And that guy—”

“—can stand here and look me in the eye like a man. So I’m going to treat him like one.” He returned his attention to Parker. “So, what’s your plan?”

“Still working on that.” Parker leaned forward, arms resting on her knees. “You said some of your people were missing.”

“Two of our agents,” Jake said. “Carisma and Sani. They’d called in that they found a couple of UDAs—”

“UDAs?” Parker asked.

“Undocumented aliens,” Jake explained. “Border crossers. Anyway, after that, we lost contact, and when we went out there, they were gone. Somebody took them _and_ their truck. The UDAs, too.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t traffickers or drug runners?” Alec asked, just to make sure they’d checked off all possibilities.

“This is where the sign led.” Dan nodded toward the slope and what lay beyond it. “Not the kind of place those guys would run to. And anyhow, neither of those types would have four guys in tactical gear driving a Z71 Tahoe with all-terrain tires.” Noticing Alec’s stare, he added, “It’s a very distinctive set of tracks.”

Eliot nodded appreciatively, having apparently found a kindred spirit here in the wasteland. “Defense contractors, you think?” he asked.

“Looks like it. It fits with what we’ve seen while we’ve been here.” Picking up a stick, Dan started sketching the outline of the base in the dirt. Eliot came over and hunkered down next to him, and the two of them went off into a discussion of guard stations and patrol routes and the kind of weaponry they might run into. Alec let the specialist details flow over and through him into backbrain storage, trusting that they’d pop up again if they ever became relevant, and focused on the overall layout of the place. The Wolves had been watching it for a few hours and had built up a pretty clear picture of what was where and how many people they might be dealing with.

“It’s barely even a skeleton crew, considering the size of this place,” Dan concluded, sitting back. He wiped his forehead, then took a swig of water. “Still bad odds, even if I called in all our guys. Which I’m not about to do. We’re not BORTAC; this is far outside our role. And I’m not about to risk us all getting killed or ‘disappeared.’ ”

Parker pulled down her sunglasses to give him a considering look. “What would you do if we weren’t here?”

“Call it in to the higher-ups,” he said promptly. “Not a great solution. It’d take time to get a serious investigation going, and by then they’d’ve gotten wind of it. Either they’d move on, or they’d call on their own friends in high places and get the whole thing buried deep. Of course, now that I know that there might be a connection to Portland, I can go straight to the FBI, and hope that we get some attention right away.” As he returned Parker’s gaze, his own was frank and unapologetic. “And that’s my plan as of right now, unless you have a really good idea that gets my people out faster.”

Okay, enough was enough—Alec was dying here. “A’ight, we’re working on that, but can we take this whole planning session to someplace with air conditioning, _please_?” He flapped his shirt against his chest for whatever tiny breeze it might generate. “I’m serious, man, this is like the tenth out of the nine hells.”

“Aw, you don’t like our weather, man?” Jake smirked, finally tipping his gun up to rest against his shoulder, as if he’d decided that someone about to dissolve into a puddle of sweat couldn’t possibly be any danger. Alec would disabuse him of that notion if he wasn’t half afraid to touch any of his electronics. “Arizona’s one of the sunniest places in the world. Three hundred days a year of sunshine. People come for it from all over. We get snowbirds comin’ out our ears.”

“Yeah, well, rich white people be crazy like that. But do any of them live here without AC? Do they? No, they do not.”

Dan stood up, a little creakily. “We can head on over to Las Avispas. I’m pretty sure Dee will open the bar up for us.”

“Hey,” Parker said, poking Alec in passing as he got ready to peel himself off the rock, “you can get one of those tee-shirts.”

“A tee—no, I do _not_ want a tee-shirt. You know what I want? _You know what I want?_ I want a goddamn soda, _Eliot_.”

Eliot ignored him, and oh, he was so going to get payback. Just as soon as they got back to civilization.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The [Shadow Wolves](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/shadow-wolves-74485304/%22) are an actual thing that exists! Somehow I stumbled across them while doing research for this story, and I couldn't help but include them. There's actually a movie about them--it's not a very good movie, especially since the main character is a boring white guy with man pain, but I thought the portrayal of the Native characters (played by Native actors) was pretty decent. (Dan was very loosely inspired by Graham Greene's character.)
> 
> The town of Las Avispas is based on the border town of Sasabe, Arizona.


	12. Chapter 12

“ _So then you’ve got your tarantula hawk,_ ” Dan was saying cheerfully, continuing his list of all the horrific things that lived in this desert and were a large part of the reason why no sane person should ever, _ever_ want to visit it, let alone actually live there. And yet here Alec was, squatting in the dark behind a goddamn _cactus_ with spines big enough that Parker could use them as lock picks, trying not to hyperventilate at the thought of what might be crawling over his body right at that very moment, about to make its way up inside his pants leg or down the neck of his shirt.

But now this guy was just messing with him. “Say _what_? A _tarantula hawk_? Naw, ain’t no way that’s a thing.”

“ _Sure it is._ _Pepsis formosa. It’s a kind of wasp that lays its egg in a tarantula and then the baby eats its way out._ ”

“ _Ew_ , oh my God, stop. That’s just disgusting.”

“ _It’s got one of the most painful stings in the world,_ ” Dan continued, happy as a cat warming its butt on a laptop.

“ _Worse’n a bullet ant?_ ” Eliot asked.

“ _About the same, I think_.”

Eliot chuckled. “ _Oh man. Bullet ants are awful_.” He sounded almost nostalgic.

Alec really did not want to meet anything that could cause pain that Eliot Spencer thought was awful.

“Man, how do you even _know_ all these things?” he griped. “Is there, like, some kind of special survival school you all gotta attend before your parents even let you out the front door?”

“ _My first wife was a naturalist—she used to work at a park visitor center. So I picked up a few things over the years. Hey, did I mention the gila monsters yet?_ ”

“Hold up _,_ ” said Parker, blessed, blessed Parker. “We have incoming.” The comm chatter stopped, and in the hush Alec could make out the noise that Parker must have heard, distant but quickly coming closer: the _thupthupthup_ of a helicopter.

“Aw, no, do _not_ fuck up the plan,” he muttered. “I ain’t going through this torture again.”

The helicopter came in over the desert, its lights glaring out of the night sky; it found a flat space inside the base’s perimeter and settled easily to the ground. As soon as it was down, a couple of men climbed out and strode toward the main buildings as behind them the rotors slowly whined and sputtered to a stop.

“That’s our guy,” Parker said, peering through the scope. “That’s Greene.”

Alec’s lips twitched up in a smirk. “Well, well. How _convenient_.” They hadn’t been sure he was actually on site; his arrival was good news, since now they should be able to wrap the whole thing up in one shot.

“We’re still on?” Jake asked, slipping up to crouch next to him in a way that was probably super stealthy to anyone who didn’t work with Parker.

“Yep. Just gotta wait a little bit longer.” Some minutes passed while the helicopter’s pilot finished shutting it down. Finally the machine went still and silent, and shortly after that the pilot headed out as well.

“We’re clear,” Parker said, as soon as they were out of sight. “Start your approach.”

“ _Roger that,_ ” Dan responded. “ _Team, let’s roll out._ ”

“Eliot, go.” Eliot didn’t answer, but Alec knew he was on the move, prowling through the scrub toward the compound.

“Still think I should’ve been the one,” Jake muttered.

Alec chuckled. “Yeah, no.” He pointed to the fence, all lit up like day. “See there, on that post, that’s an IROD thermographic camera system. It’s programmed to watch for moving objects in the size and heat range of a human body, and if it spots one, it triggers an alert in the security center. But now Eliot’s core temp is fifteen degrees below the human baseline. So even if the camera registers him, it won’t trip an alarm. Only thing we gotta worry about is if someone’s got eyes on the screen at just the wrong moment. And that’s what your guys are here for.”

On cue, a car horn blared in the distance. “ _Hey!_ ” Dan yelled. “ _Heyyyyy. Why’s this gate here?_ ” At the sound, Eliot broke from the bushes to cross the broad cleared swath before the fence, moving low and fast.

_Honk, honk, hoooonk_ went the car. “ _Y’ can’t block this road! ’S a public...public thor-ough-fare._ ” Somebody yelled back, although it was too far away to make out words. “ _What’re you talking about? Course I know where I am! Take this road ever’ day. Me ’n’ my boys gonna hit up the casino! Have a good time!_ ” There was more shouting, multiple voices whooping gleefully and the guard’s voice thin and sharp in the midst of them.

Eliot had reached the fence and was climbing. They were lucky that the base was unfinished and the fence along the construction area was half-assed—chain-link instead of a solid wall, no barbed wire, no electricity, and the camera just a quick, jury-rigged addition stuck on a fence post. Hooking one arm over the top of the fence, Eliot used his free hand to hold Alec’s improvised heat baffle over the lens. “ _Go_ ,” he growled.

The three of them dashed across the open space, hit the fence, and climbed quickly. As soon as they were on the ground inside, Eliot snatched the baffle off the camera, went over the top, and dropped down next to them. “We’re past the fence,” Parker said.

A car door slammed. “ _This is not no private land!_ ” Dan declaimed. “ _All of this! Alllll of this! Is Indian country!_ ” More cheering. Jake looked pissed off, his pride obviously offended by Dan’s drunk Indian routine. But humiliating as it was, sometimes playing to the stereotypes gave you the advantage that you needed. Give people what they expect to see, what they want to believe.

And then hand them their asses.

Under cover of the hubbub, they slipped across the construction zone. The one guard in the tower on the other side of the base never even glanced away from the gate.

At the building complex, they separated, Parker and Jake breaking off to circle around back, while Alec and Eliot headed straight for what he devoutly hoped was the security office. With all the secret construction shenanigans, he hadn’t been able to dig up actual plans for the site, and the official materials didn’t look anything like the reality on the ground. But it made sense for it to be near the gate, in the part that looked like an actual office building and not a warehouse.

They got within yards of the side door he’d targeted. “Okay, maximum distraction,” he murmured.

“ _This! Is what I have to say! To your gate!_ ” Whatever Dan actually “said” must have been nonverbal, because suddenly an absolute chaos of laughter, jeering, and shouting broke out. Several more car horns added to the uproar. He and Eliot ran to the door, which had a simple electronic lock that took two seconds to bypass. They found themselves in a short back hallway, and Eliot took point, slinking up to the open doorway on their left.

“Aw, man,” a voice called out from inside, incredulous, half laughing. “Can you believe that guy actually took a leak on the gate?” Which meant he probably had a grin on his face when Eliot whipped around the corner and started hitting. Hey, lucky man—not everybody got to go down smiling.

Alec darted into the room before Eliot had finished laying out the guards, jumping on the system as fast as possible. All straightforward, nothing he hadn’t seen before. “We’re inside. Got eyes on the cameras. All your base are belong to us.”

“ _We’re in too_ ,” Parker said. “ _Looks like a maintenance area. Dan, go ahead and clear out._ ”

“ _Okay! Okay!_ ” Dan shouted at the guards. “ _Yeah, well—fuck you!_ ”

“ _Language,_ ” Jake muttered. Alec couldn’t tell if the man was being ironic or not. Glancing at the gate monitor, he saw Dan being escorted back to his truck by a couple of buddies. The whole crew he’d recruited turned their vehicles around, with much getting in each other’s way and and even more blaring horns and yelling. Smirking, Alec shifted his focus back to the interior cameras.

“Okay, I got you,” he told Parker. “Let’s see, let’s see, do we have a site plan.” Nope, not as such, but from the alarm system map, the hand-written labels on the monitors, and the orientation of the cameras he was at least getting an idea of the shape of things. “All right, so it looks like we got three main sections here. Utility, maintenance, warehouse—that’s where you’re at. We’re in admin and security. Then the third area is...uh.”

“ _What ‘uh’?_ ” Parker demanded. “ _That doesn’t sound like a good ‘uh.’_ ”

“That third area would be the detention center itself. And we got occupants.” He watched the crowd of figures, some of them wandering aimlessly around the huge empty room, but most of them just standing motionless, and a chill sank down into his guts. “Oh lord, we got occupants. Zombie central, right there.”

“ _So we avoid that part_ ,” Parker said.

“ _Wait, no!_ ” Jake broke in. “ _We have to look for our people. That’s where they’re gonna be, in detention._ ”

Alec scrutinized the video, but a lot of the captives were turned away from the camera. “I can’t make out if they’re there or not.” He started flipping through the various feeds, and quickly realized that he didn’t have many options. “Great, looks like they didn’t get the whole camera system up and running. There are big gaps in the coverage. Wait—wait, I see ’em. Looks like they’re in a separate set of cells.” His attention laser focused, trying to make out details, he was only vaguely aware Eliot coming up to him, putting a hand on the back of the chair, and leaning forward to look over his shoulder. “I don’t think they’ve been turned yet.” Eliot didn’t disagree, which was promising.

“ _Where are they?_ _How do we get there?_ ” Jake demanded. Pushy, pushy. Although he had to admit that their crew would probably be the exact same way, if any one of them was being held like this.

“Okay, _if_ I’m reading this right,” _if_ the cameras were set up in any way that made sense, and he hoped and prayed that they were, “the main detention area is between us and you. The cells seem to be on our side. Some kind of intake area.”

“ _I’m heading over there_ ,” Jake said.

“ _No, you’re not._ ” Parker’s voice cut across the comms, sharp and exasperated. “ _Hardison, where’s the virus?_ ”

“I’m looking! Be just our luck if that’s one of the many places they _don’t_ have cameras.” Entrances, gate area, periphery, c’mon, where would a virus be kept....

“That, there,” Eliot pointed, and Alec peered at the feed, incredulous.

“The _kitchen_?”

“On that counter, that definitely ain’t no kitchen equipment. Especially for an industrial kitchen.”

“They’re brewing up zombie plague in a _kitchen_?” Alec fell back in his chair, throwing up his hands in disgust and dismay. “Oh my god. That is some next-level health code violation for sure.” More important for them at the moment, there was a horrifying lack of biosafety equipment. It was giving him flashbacks to that ancient, boarded-up underground lab in D.C. Sitting forward quickly, he said, “Look, you guys are going to need to be super careful—”

“ _Hey_.” Eliot gestured at the screen again.

“Oh, now _who_ the hell is that?” The man backing out of a doorway in the kitchen with what was unmistakably a gun in his hand was a complication they did _not_ need. As soon as he cleared the heavy door, he hauled on it and slammed it shut, flipped a locking bar, and then looked around frantically. The angle was bad—his face was only visible for a split second, and Alec had to jump from the live feed to the recording to get a decent look at him. “That’s Mike, Mike Peters, the scientist from AdVitam that Emilia named, the guy who went with Greene.” Before he could say anything else, start speculating on what was going on, part of the security station buzzed. Some kind of intercom system, it looked like. Catching Eliot’s eyes, Alec tilted his head: _answer it._

_What, are you kidding me,_ Eliot’s expression said.

_Aw, c’mon, would you just—._

_No, you._

_Okay, fine, be that way._ Alec pressed the button. “Uh, hey. ’Sup?” Eliot glared, incredulous, and Alec shook his head right back at him. _Should’ve answered it yourself, then._

“That, that scientist guy, Peters! He locked me in the cold room. Made me give him the samples.” Even over the intercom, panic was clear in the man’s voice. “He sprayed me in the face with something, said it was the virus! You gotta help me! You gotta get him, get the antidote!”

“Okay, okay, we got you, we’re gonna sound the alarm,” Alec said. “Just hang on.”

“Hurry, man, hurry!” the guard—it had to be a guard—gasped before Alec cut the connection.

“Peters is on the run with the virus samples,” he summed up for the benefit of the crew, flicking back to the live feed. The man was gone. “Shit, he’s out of pocket.”

“ _Hardison, we’re moving!”_ Parker snapped “ _Where are we going?_ ”

“Uh, in toward the center. The kitchen’s on the other side of the warehouse from you. He’s either gotta come back your way or run up against the detention area.”

“ _Got it._ ”

“We’ll go for the servers, then get the Patrol guys.” Grabbing his bag, he surged up out of the chair.

“Go,” Eliot said, moving forward to hover over the screens in his place. “Down the hall, to the left.” Alec nodded his acknowledgment. Eliot had had plenty of time to do a sweep while he was getting oriented to the surveillance system; it had to be safe, and Eliot standing watch on the cameras was an extra layer of security. He found the server room right where Eliot had said it would be and got to work.

Quiet fell over the comms then. It always made him uneasy, hearing nothing from anyone, but before he could say something to break the silence, Jake piped up. “ _Hey. Do you think he really has an antidote?_ ”

“Dunno. Seems unlikely, if a whole mess of experts all working together haven’t made any progress with it.” The security on this setup was barely worthy of the name—a basic out-of-the-box system that he could crack with one hand while riffing on a terrible SyFy Channel movie and eating one of Eliot’s delicious sandwiches. Well, but nobody had been expecting super-secret and highly illegal scientific research to be taking place way out here in desert ass-crack land. “The spray could’ve just been a con to get control of the guard.”

“ _So what’re we gonna do about the people? All those UDAs?_ ”

The background annoyance he’d been feeling over that acronym flared to life. “Hey, man, why you gotta call them that? They ain’t a bunch of letters. They’re people.”

“ _You think I don’t know that?_ ” Jake snarled. “ _Of course they’re people._ ”

“Yeah, well, that’s how groups of people get dehumanized, y’know, they get turned into numbers and labels. That’s how things like _internment camps_ happen. Oh hey, remember those? That’s a thing that exists.”

He could practically hear Jake spitting sparks over the comm. “ _Don’t you dare lump us in with them! We don’t have anything to do with that!_ ”

“Oh, sure, you just work for the _Border Patrol_ , the people who’re rounding up immigrants all over the damn place!”

“ _You think that’s what we’re doing out here—_ ”

“Ain’t that your job? And hey, I don’t see you standing up against them either—”

“ _You know what we do out here? You know what we do? We stop human traffickers_. _We stop drug smugglers._ That’s _our job._ ”

“ _Jake_ ,” Dan said, with the tired air of someone all too familiar with this argument who didn’t disagree but really wished there was less shouting involved. Alec had forgotten he was still on comms.

“ _You know what we do when we find immigrants out here? Huh? We give them fucking water and point them the way out of the desert. They would_ die _out here, man. We save their lives, let them try to get to that future they’re chasing._ That’s _what we do. So what’re_ you _doing?_ ”

Okay. That stung. Because with their abilities and experience, they were in a position where they might actually be able to make some kind of difference. They’d stolen a whole country once, after all. But it had been a very small country. Going up against the huge, sprawling, multiheaded beast of the American government was on another level entirely. Hell, they’d had enough trouble just getting that one bill through Congress.

“ _Times like these,_ ” Dan said into the tense silence, “ _a person does what they can, however small. Maybe we don’t have the reach to do much about all the rest of it. But here, on our own ground, we can do a little good, show some kindness to our fellow human beings. Try to make things better, one person at a time._ ”

Just like always, leverage was what was needed to make a real difference. “Wonder how many politicians we’d have to bring down to dismantle those camps entirely,” Alec murmured to himself.

“ _Oh, sure,_ now _you’re gonna take some action_ —”

“ _Knock it off!_ ” Parker snapped. “ _Both of you! Let’s focus on the job we’re doing_ right now _. How’re those servers coming?_ ”

“Already got the files, baby girl, just scrubbing the place clean.”

He was doing a final scan to make sure everything had been wiped when Eliot suddenly swore over the comm. “ _Hardison!_ ” He sounded tense, not mad, which was never a good sign. Alec scrambled for the corridor and slung himself around the corner into the guard post, where Eliot was hunkered forward over the console, glaring at one of the screens. “That idiot went into the detention area.”

“Oh, he did _not_.” But yeah, there was the open doorway, and no sign of the person who’d opened it. Flicking to another view, Alec immediately wished he hadn’t. Thank god there was no sound. “Oh, ew, no, that is just— _damn_.” He looked away, but not fast enough to avoid picking up on some nightmare fuel that was going to be tons of fun the next time he had to go to sleep.

“ _Talk to me_ ,” Parker said, her voice thin and taut as one of her rigging-lines.

“They just _swarmed_ the guy. Like, not even giving him a chance to turn zombie, they just tore into him, chomp, chomp, blood and guts all over the place.” He risked another peek and immediately regretted it. “Ugh—is that a _spleen_? I don’t even know what a spleen looks like, but I bet that’s what that is. Oh my god.”

“It’s not a spleen.” Eliot’s eyes had never faltered for a second; they were still locked onto the monitor. “I see some kind of case on the floor. That’s probably got the samples in it.”

“Yeah, and it’s surrounded by like two dozen zombies right now! How we gonna get to it?”

“ _One of us can draw them off,_ ” Jake said. “ _The other one can grab the case._ ”

“ _I’m faster_ ,” Parker said.

“ _I have the rifle._ ”

Either way they decided to go, it was a terrible plan, but nothing better was occurring to him, and Parker had promised to taser him if he ever got too overprotective again, so Alec bit his lip and prayed that this all went better than your average horror movie.

“ _All right._ ” Parker said. “ _Remember the exit route, and don’t let them corner you. No macho last stand bullshit._ ”

“As soon as you start shooting, we’re going to have guards in here,” Eliot reminded Jake. “So run if you can, but if you can’t, do what you need to to keep them off your back. Just remember that we’ll have company.”

“ _Roger that._ ”

“And Parker— _gloves_. It’s a mess in there.”

“ _Yep. Got ’em._ ”

“Let’s go,” Eliot said, giving Alec a quick rap on the shoulder, then pausing when Alec just shook his head instead of following.

“I can’t, man, I can’t,” he mouthed, putting barely a breath into it, so the comm wouldn’t pick it up. He gestured toward the monitors. How was he supposed to leave when his girl was heading right into the heart of a nightmare? What if she needed help, and he didn’t even know what was going on? He’d lose his mind imagining what might be happening. At least this way he could be an extra set of eyes on her, giving her guidance, or at least a heads-up on any danger coming at her. After a moment, Eliot nodded, and they turned together back to the screens.

They watched the two jog through the kitchen until they passed out of camera range. There was no coverage from that point until the entrance of the detention area, and it was a tense wait until Jake appeared, creeping up to the open door. He paused, peering past the door frame, then stepped in front of the opening and banged together a couple of pans he’d grabbed in the kitchen. “ _Hey! HEY!_ ”

On another screen, the zombies looked up with sudden, sharp attention—and then a mass of them charged toward the door.

“ _Whoa!_ ” Jake threw one pan, then the other, managing to clock one of the lead zombies in the face, then turned and bolted. “ _Motherfuckers are_ fast! _What the hell!_ ”

Great. Fast-type zombies. Couldn’t have been shamblers, oh no. Alec glanced sidelong at Eliot’s grim face, wondering if he’d been aware that those existed. Surely he’d have warned them, if so. And _he’d_ been slow, that one time he’d gone at Alec in the bedroom. They were missing some piece of knowledge here, and Alec didn’t like that one bit.

Onscreen, zombies were still trailing out the door. These moved more slowly, compared to the first rush; some of them were visibly damaged, and Alec thought a few might even be deaders. In the kitchen, Jake was staging a desperate fighting retreat, throwing anything that came to hand. He kicked some kind of cart at the zombies, managing to tangle them up in an aisle until several scrambled up onto the counters and got around the blockage. He backed up fast, then turned and started running again.

Back in detention, Parker slipped into view, approaching the door. Alec flicked his gaze to the interior camera. “We still got a few in there,” he warned.

“ _There’s no time to wait. How many?_ ”

“Looks like four. Slow ones, only one near the door.”

Parker’s reply was to dart into the room. She jammed her taser into the nearest zombie until it fell, then lunged for the case. It was small, maybe a little larger than a lunchbox, and lying in the midst of...of.... Parker faltered at the sight of the remains, and Alec’s stomach twisted in sympathy. Bad enough just seeing them at this safe remove with the camera’s low resolution hiding the worst of it; he didn’t know how Parker could stand right there looking at it all without vomiting. But after that brief hesitation, she crouched and reached out for the case.

An arm moved. A thing that had _been_ an arm. It jerked, fingers clasping. Parker sprang away like a bird launching itself into the air, but the case was already safe in her hand. Holding it out awkwardly, away from her body, she located the remaining zombies, still at a distance, then ran for the door. She slammed it shut after her, scanned the immediate area for danger, then zipped out of view.

“ _Got it,_ ” she reported. “ _Oh god, that was gross. Jake, what’s your status?_ ”

“ _Royally fucked! Damn it!_ ” He wasn’t visible on any of the cameras, but they heard a grunting shout of effort. “ _Hey, did you know these guys can open doors? I didn’t think zombies could do that!_ ”

“They’re just full of surprises,” Alec muttered, with another glance at Eliot. “What’re these, some kind of super zombies?”

“Why’re you looking at me?” Eliot retorted. “You think I know?”

“ _Where are you?_ ” Parker asked.

“ _Some kind of...water treatment thing? Nnph...! They cut me off before I could get to our exit door. It’s like they’re—like they’re pack hunting!_ ”

“Group mind,” Eliot said suddenly, his voice disquietly soft. Alec froze, then turned to look at him. His face was blank—with shock? or something else?—his gaze focused inward. Then he blinked away whatever memory had caught hold of him, and his expression sharpened, his scowl returning. “They’re mentally linked. You gotta split them up.”

“ _Yeah, well, they’ve got me treed right now, so that’s not going to be so easy._ ”

“Then start taking them down. Parker?”

“There,” Alec said, pointing. She’d found a bag in the kitchen and wrapped up the case before belting it to herself, freeing her hands.

“ _I’m on my way to the exit,_ ” she reported.

“ _I’ll hold position until you get clear,_ ” Jake replied. “ _Then I’ll shoot my way out._ ”

“What _did I say about stupid macho bullshit?_ ”

“ _Uh...you find it attractive?_ ”

“Oh, no,” Alec muttered. “Don’t you even.” Eliot had stepped away, and he spared a moment to glance a question at him.

“Things are getting too hot. We can’t wait any longer.” Searching the guards, Eliot came up with a key card. “I’m going after their people. You keep on keeping watch.”

“Like I wouldn’t.” Alec scanned the screens again, but Parker was still off-camera. He did a quick search through the channels but couldn’t find Jake; apparently nothing in the utility area was wired up yet. “Be careful, man—” An all-too-familiar click interrupted him, and he spun the chair just in time to see Eliot slap the magazine back into a guard’s pistol. Thrusting the gun into his waistband, he started rifling through the man’s belt pouches, and Alec’s throat closed in shock and a heartsick fear that no one who didn’t know Eliot would understand. He had to fight to get his words out. “ _Eliot_. I—"

“I can’t get near them. Do you understand me?” Eliot’s voice shook, barely noticeable. He wouldn’t meet Alec’s eyes as he shoved a couple more magazines into his pockets. “I don’t have a _choice._ ”

Eliot was being pushed to the edge. He was _scared._ And suddenly their situation felt about ten thousand times worse.

“I hear you,” Alec managed somehow. Straightening, Eliot looked at him at last, with eyes as black as whatever memories he kept locked down way deep inside, where no one else would ever know the horror of them. Strangely, Alec found it steadying. “You got this,” he said, with a dreamlike calm. “Do what you need to do.” Eliot held his gaze for a moment more, as if testing that certainty. Then his jaw firmed, and he was gone, out the door in a rush like some kind of hunting animal released, all speed and ferocity.

Shaking his head, Alec swiveled back to the security console, stuffing down his not-quite-a-panic-yet anxiety and letting a familiar frustration bubble up to replace it. “Man, one of these days you’re gonna trust us not to freak out over just what kind of a bad, bad dude you are,” he muttered. If Eliot heard, he didn’t answer.

Seriously. Like he didn’t know about that warehouse. A fire at that particular airport, on that particular day? Multiple bodies, some of them not burned badly enough to hide that they’d actually been killed by gunshots? Who exactly did Eliot think ran cleanup after their jobs, making sure that nothing was being tracked back to them?

Must be the evidence fairy, apparently. No appreciation, after all this time.

He caught a flicker of movement on one of the screens and squinted at it. “Parker, you in the front storage area right now?”

“ _Yep._ ”

“Okay, I got you.” Even staring right at what he knew had to be her, she was hard to make out. Just a slinking glide of black in the shadows of the tall shelving units, a brief glimmer of blonde hair and pale skin...something moved in the half-light behind her, something _else_ , and he tensed. “Babe, you got company. Coming up on your eight o’clock.”

Flick of her bright hair as she turned her head. The advancing zombie came on one lumbering step at a time—one of the stragglers from the pack that’d chased Jake, probably. Parker retreated at the same slow pace, creeping sideways along the aisle, taser dropping into her hand as she eyed the zombie, probably weighing whether to fight or flee.

“Wait, there’s another one! Behind—” But she was already glancing that way, clocking the one coming down the aisle from the opposite direction. That definitely changed the odds to be in favor of running, but now she was pinned down. Alec’s hands twitched, helpless.

Parker bolted, straight across the aisle. Both zombies charged as soon as she started running, going from shamble to sprint with a startling surge of speed, but she was already up the shelving quick as a cat before they came anywhere near within reach of her. They stumbled to a stop and stared up at her, mouths gaping like baby birds. After a quick glance around to orient herself, Parker prowled along the top of the shelves, watching the zombies closely as they sidled along with her, matching her unhurried pace.

And he was about to lose sight of her again.

“No, no...God _damn_ it. Give. Me. _Cameras_.” Wait, wait. C’mon— _think_. “Parker! Look up and behind you. Do you see the camera?”

“ _Yeah?_ ”

“Is there a wire?”

“ _Looks like—yes._ ”

Not wireless. Probably running over Ethernet. “Look around, do you see any other cameras?”

A pause. “ _I see at least two_.”

Yeah, that made sense—if they were going to run wiring, they’d do it all at once, throughout the whole complex. All the cameras were up, so why...aw, hell, _that_ was why. Probably. “Just—just give me a minute!” Grabbing his tablet, he flung himself out of his chair and around the back of the console. “Stay where you are!” In under a second, he had the cabinet door open to find...one recording unit. _One_.

“Are you kidding...I’m’a punch their IT guy in the face is what I’m gonna do.” Eight channels on the box and a whole mess of unplugged cables. And nothing labeled. “This thing better be remote-viewing capable.”

“ _Ugh! Would you hurry the fuck up!_ ” Jake yelled, just as he discovered that yes, the system featured remote monitoring and brought the video up on his tablet.

“Not my fault they picked up only one cheap-ass recorder on the way out here. Probably stopped at that Walmart outside Tucson.” Hands flying, he plugged and unplugged cables, using the tablet feed to figure out which cameras they were connected to. Kill all the outside views except for the main door into security. Drop the kitchen and the main detention area, but keep the cells where Eliot was opening the door on the patrol officers. His voice was a low undertone over the comm that Alec let wash past in the background: nothing he needed to worry about just then. Bring up all the warehouse and the maintenance area cameras—which didn’t leave him anything for Jake in utility. God _damn._ “Have y’all never heard of a _junction box_ , I swear to God—” Unplug this, plug in that, and _there_ , all the people. Jake was in the process of pulling himself up onto a pipe way up near the ceiling while a ravening mess of zombies scrabbled after him. “Okay, Parker, go.”

“ _Already went. Sorry._ ”

He opened his mouth on a complaint, even though there was really no point, because Parker was Parker, but before he got a word out he heard the far-away, muffled-but-still-barely-audible chatter of automatic fire.

“ _Sorry, guys._ ” Jake said. “ _They were getting way too friendly._ ”

“ _It happens,_ ” Parker replied.

“ _Now what you need to do_ ,” Eliot was saying, not to them, as Alec leaped around the console to lock down the front door, then grabbed his bag and booked it for detention, “ _is stay as calm as possible. Try to keep your heart rate low._ ”

Uh oh. That sounded like a problem.

As he jogged, he flicked the video feed over to Parker, who at some point must have slithered down the shelves on the opposite side from the zombies, because she was back on the floor, an aisle over from them now. That was all he had time to see before he had to pay attention to not running into the door frame as he arrived at the holding area.

Eliot glanced briefly at him before turning his attention back to the woman—Carisma, presumably—who was sitting on the bench in a cell. She looked like she was probably Latina, at least in part; she was broad, with a wrestler’s arm muscles and a badass haircut, but her eyes were terrified, and her color wasn’t looking so good. She rubbed at her upper arm as she stared up at Eliot.

“You got a little while,” Eliot said. “I don’t know how long, but if an injection’s like a bite, it takes some time. It’s gonna hurt, but you need to stay focused. Hardison, you got the stuff?”

“Do I got the stuff, he says.” Shuffling his bag around, Alec pulled out a little black-and-yellow pop-top can with an only slightly gross picture on the front and waggled it at Eliot.

“Okay. So you stay near Hardison, and if your head starts getting fuzzy, or things start to go dark, you let him know _immediately_.” As Eliot helped Carisma up and started ushering her out of the cell, a guy ducked out of a side room, slinging a rifle strap over his shoulder. He and Alec both tensed, before the guy glanced over at Eliot, read the lack of concern, and then nodded at Alec. Okay, so that was Sani. He was shorter than Parker, whipcord lean, with sharp eyes and a nose that had clearly been broken a time or two. His long hair was coming out of its braid.

It was go time, and Alec consulted his tablet. “We got guards at the front door.”

“Then we’re going out the back,” Eliot said. Out the back, where there was an unknown number of zombies between them and the exit. Yay, fun times. Eliot signaled Sani to take point and Alec and Carisma to follow, falling into the rear-guard position himself. “Parker, how’re you doing?”

“ _I think I’ve lost them._ ”

“No—no, you haven’t. _Listen_. Even if they can’t see you, they can track you. They can find you by smell.”

Surprised, Alec glanced back at Eliot. “Wait, is that a thing you can—”

Eliot overrode him. “And there’s this thing, I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like a, an _energy_ that people give off. Like electricity. It’s strongest when you’re moving.”

“Man, why have you not been telling us about all this?”

“It was never _relevant_ —”

“ _Oops! Hey, there._ ”

_What_ oops? They’d reached the entrance to the main detention block, and Sani was scanning the big, dimly lit space through the clear security doors; Alec gave that only a sliver of his attention, focusing instead on the tiny figure of Parker on his tablet. Switching cameras, he saw what she was seeing: a walker approaching her down a crossing aisle. Another emerged and began following the first one, both moving at the same creeping pace. Parker retreated warily, matching their speed, keeping an even distance between herself and the first one.

Eliot leaned past him to flash the key card at the door’s control panel. The door released—Sani hauled it open and darted through, took aim, and fired once, then again. Eliot pushed Alec forward, and he and Carisma went. It was terrifying, not just the prospect of zombies looming in front of them, but that he had to keep an eye out, which meant he couldn’t track what was going on with Parker. There was no screaming over the comm, though. No screaming was good; he’d take that. And it didn’t seem like there were any more zombies left in this room aside from the handful he’d seen before. After that first hurried kill, Sani had gone intense but steady, taking advantage of his targets’ slowness to carefully line up his shots. One head shot, then another, with businesslike precision. No panic.

“ _It’s weird,_ ” Parker said suddenly. She sounded like faced-with-a-puzzle Parker, faintly annoyed at not yet having an answer but mind working hard, any fear shoved way into the background. It was both a good sign—she wasn’t in immediate trouble—and a bad one—she could be particularly reckless when she was on the attack. “ _That’s one of the ones from before. I know he can move faster than that. So why isn’t he?_ ”

“Count your blessings, girl.” The mess of former scientist lay ahead of them, and Alec guided Carisma wide around it. He tried not to think about the fact that it was still moving. Her breathing sounded harsh, and when Sani threw open the far side door, letting in more light, sweat gleamed on her face, but her pupils still contracted. Not too far gone yet.

“C’mon!” Sani whispered-called. They hurried forward—

—and _blam_ from directly behind them. Alec jumped, his heart kicking into overdrive. He looked back to see Eliot stepping away from the now-still remains, his expression shuttered down hard. Alec couldn’t catch his eye, didn’t know what to say even if he could, and it probably wasn’t a moment for trying to make things right anyway. With nothing else to do, he kept on going.

“Hate having to do this,” Sani muttered as they joined him. “They were just people, you know?”

“Yeah,” Eliot said. He closed the door, even though there was nothing—no one—left ambulatory behind them. “I know.”

Through another set of security doors, and they were at the kitchen. Alec side-eyed the lab setup, wondering if they should do anything about it, but since they had the actual virus material, there was probably no need.

“ _They’re mirroring!_ ” Parker announced triumphantly, startling him.

“They’re what?” He jumped again at the sound of a dull, muffled thunk, but then realized it was coming from the walk-in cooler, so it was just that one guard. Well, he was going to have to hang on by himself a bit longer. Hopefully somebody would find him before he became either a zombie or an icicle. Or a zombie-cicle. Eyebrows raised, Sani glanced at Eliot, who waved him onward.

“ _They’re mirroring. When I go slow, they go slow. When I go faster—_ ” Warned by the excitement in her voice, he looked down at the screen in alarm, just in time to see her make a dash toward a pile of crates. She rolled over the top of them, landing in a crouch on the other side, out of view of the two zombies that came racing up after her. “—they _go faster_.” The zombies pulled up short in front of the crates, seeming puzzled, and she backed slowly away, putting more distance between them. When the zombies finally wandered around the crates—following her scent, most likely—and spotted her, that slow-motion pursuit began again.

“Careful, baby, don’t play with the zombies—that never ends well for anyone.” Reminded, he checked on Carisma again—still okay.

“ _They don’t act, they just react,_ ” Parker mused, and he really wished that she’d at least acknowledged his very sensible, well-informed advice, because storywise it was the perfect moment for ill-considered cockiness to turn around and bite them in the ass. “ _They’re not so scary when they’re just dumb like this._ ”

“Parker, stop fooling around and get out of there,” Eliot snapped.

“ _Mmm._ ” Parker had backed up against another row of shelves, and as the zombies drew inexorably closer, she took hold of it and somehow did this slow, perfectly controlled acrobatic roll right up the side of the unit. He could swear that at one point while she was upside down she was holding on by one hand and the crook of her ankles. The zombies drifted to a stop beneath her, staring up as if they were as amazed by her as he was.

He was briefly distracted as their group reached the transition point from the kitchen to the storage area; Sani went a little farther out in front to check for danger while the rest of them paused. When he glanced back at the screen, Parker was crouching on top of the shelves. She had somehow taken off her bra without removing her shirt and was dangling it above the zombies. Their heads swiveled in unison to follow it as she swung it back and forth.

“ _Yeah, come on! You like that, don’t you? Mm-mmm, boob sweat!_ ”

“What the _hell_ is she doing?” Eliot demanded, and Alec could only shake his head and gesture vaguely, grinning in helpless disbelief.

Having gotten the zombies fixated on the bra, Parker tied some kind of tool to it, waved it over them again, and then threw it way down the aisle, where it bounced and rolled—the tool was for weight, Alec realized, so it would actually travel. The zombies lumbered off in pursuit, which was unreal and totally hilarious, and he took a moment to make sure he had the video clip stored on his tablet. When he refocused, Parker had vanished. And maybe he should’ve been terrified again, but honestly? Between her brains and her mad skills, his girl was probably the least endangered person in this whole complex.

Eliot gave him a little shove from behind, and he realized that Sani was waving them on. Drawing a breath, he steeled himself for a nerve-wracking next few minutes and followed Sani into the gloom of the warehouse.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This chapter and the next one end on MAJOR cliffhangers. Like, primal scream of "AAAAAAAAA!" cliffhangers. If you think that you might be traumatized by this and/or feel compelled to reach through the screen and strangle me, you might want to wait a week and come back next Tuesday when chapter 15 is posted.

_Breathing—steady._

_Hands on the gun—steady._

_Control—always._

They eased through the maze of shelving and stacked crates, not running, but flowing quick and smooth and about as quiet as could be hoped for. Sani led them, clearing each corner with brisk professionalism; the man knew his stuff, and that was one less concern. It let him stay wider focused, all senses open to whatever subtle cues he could pick up, even as he kept a wary eye on their six.

They hadn’t had a real close encounter yet, and he was grateful for that. He’d felt those dead people in the detention area scratching at the edges of his mind, but they’d been far enough away and in bad enough condition that it had barely registered. He was reasonably sure he’d have been able to hold any one of them off, maybe even all of them.

A stronger, living one might be something else entirely. And he _really_ did not want to run into that hunting mob. If Emilia had taken him down all by herself, what would a group mind like that be capable of?

Quick and quiet. Avoid all contact and get out fast.

Voices far behind them (“ _spread out!_ ”)—a yell, semi-automatic gunfire. Sounded like the guards in pursuit had just had a run in. At least it would keep them busy. Hardison looked back, eyes wide; Sani just flicked Eliot a glance, checking for his reaction, before turning front again.

The gunfire made him realize just how quiet things had been. He touched his comm. “Jake. Situation?”

“ _I took a few of them down, and the rest’ve scattered. Haven’t seen them in a bit. How far are you from the exit?_ ”

He looked to Hardison, who was swiping at something on his tablet. “I had to shut the cameras down so Greene’s people couldn’t track us, but I’m guessing just a couple of minutes.” Hardison said. “Parker?”

“ _I’m out,_ ” she said, and Hardison’s shoulders loosened as some of the tension went out of him.

“ _I’ll climb down and meet you there_ ,” Jake said _._ “ _See you in two._ ”

“Careful,” Sani warned.

Jake laughed, but Eliot didn’t catch the rest of the reply—a whisper in his head, movement to the rear, and he snapped around to aim at the figure shuffling out of a side aisle. A second one followed, a couple of steps behind, and after a pause, seemingly to track their location, both turned and began pacing after them.

“We’ve got a tail,” he muttered. He felt Sani shift toward him, rifle lifting, and he held up a hand. “Keep going. Don’t rush.” Too much noise would draw attention, and if Parker was right about the mirroring thing, they should be able to keep their distance without much trouble. And it seemed to be working. The zombies trailed them with heavy, lurching steps, blank faces fixed on them; they tensed each time Sani whipped past a corner to sweep the aisle beyond, but the burst of movement didn’t seem enough to trigger a charge.

He guessed how they functioned made some sense as a hunting adaptation. Just follow the prey, matching its pace, and wait for it to wear itself out. A hunter that never got distracted, never lost interest and gave up, never paused to rest...

(...did _he_ actually need to rest? He’d gotten so used to just lying down and willing himself to sleep; now he wasn’t even sure if it would happen, otherwise. He didn’t know if that would be a good thing or not.)

(Probably not.)

He could feel their need picking at him, scritch-scritch-scritch, like the tiny hooked feet of a mess of June bugs, but the distance made it just a minor annoyance. And Carisma still felt like an ordinary human being. No danger there—not yet. Space opened up ahead; a quick glance over his shoulder showed him a loading area that had to be the way out. They were close now.

So of course things went straight to fucking hell.

“ _SHIT!_ ” Jake screamed, loud enough they could very faintly hear him live as well as over the comms. “ _AMBUSH!_ ”

Gunfire. And—

Far-off pressure, like a dark storm coming in.

Their pursuers straightened, a slow light of understanding dawning in their eyes.

_Crack. Crack._ He took them both down.

“ _Go, go, go!_ ” he shouted. He still had words, still had himself, but he could feel the black undertow wanting to drag him down. Could feel the buzz starting at the back of his skull, promising to shudder him apart if he let it in. Different from the hospital, in that he knew what it was now, but no less dangerous, because he still didn’t know how to beat it except to cling tight to consciousness and get the fuck away.

Hardison ran, the other two ran with him, and he followed like he could chase them all to safety.

Nearer to the door, the woman slowed, looking back. “Jake!” she cried.

_Leave him and get out._ He wanted to say it. _He’s already lost; save what we can._

(Save them. Save _Hardison_.)

But the man that he’d become, was becoming ( _better or worse, we change together_ )—that man couldn’t.

(And going back a long way, to a time when things had been simple and clean, it had been a dictum: _never leave a fellow soldier behind_.)

Besides. If that mob caught their trail—and it might, if it got close enough to catch scent or sight of them—better that he not be there. He couldn’t take the chance that he might turn right there in their midst. Better to hold the mob back as long as he could—to hold onto himself as long as he could—and give the others time to get away.

(Twelve bullets left in the gun, 30 in the spare magazines. One of them for him.)

He turned back.

In the space of a couple of strides, Hardison noticed his absence and stopped short, the other two pausing with him, which was _not_ the plan. “Eliot! _No!_ ”

“ _Go_ ,” he said. They all hesitated like dumbasses. “Get them out of here!” Hardison looked at the other two like having to be responsible for them pained him. The words had been for the guy with the rifle, but if Hardison thought he was supposed to be the one doing the protecting, that was fine—it’d get him the hell away, with no arguing. “I’ll go and get...him. Jake.”

“You get him and you come right back! You come after us! You hear me?”

He was already running toward the rolling thunderhead of mind noise, but yeah, he heard it, the raw terror shattering Hardison’s voice. And Parker, too, over the comm, thin and panicky: “ _What’s happening? What’s going on?_ ” As soon as he was out of sight, he jerked the comm out of his ear and threw it away. They didn’t need to hear whatever was going to happen.

Through shadow and half-light, down a corridor lined with pipes, all to the sounds of gasping screams, growling, and moaning up ahead. Around a corner, and—

And.

It was like...like standing outside in the face of an oncoming twister, watching it eat the sky. But the dark and the freight-train roar and the sucking drag of the wind had claws. Claws sinking into his skull. Pulling him in—down—apart.

Ahead a man was fighting with all his strength to keep a sliding door from opening all the way. Arms reached through the gap he couldn’t close, fingers ripping at the air. Distorted faces tried to push their way past, all slavering snarls, bloody teeth and vacant eyes.

Sour-salt, biting smell of terror. White lightning pulses in the flesh, in the beating inside the man’s chest. And like an answering echo, inside of _him_ —

_Not-heat of a black fire suddenly blazing underneath the skin._

—all the hunger he’d locked down—

_Want._

—controlled until it was just a dull background ache he could ignore—

_NEED._

—raged to life.

_Want I want I need we NEED—_

—no.

_Fuck_ _NO_.

He bit it all back, set his jaw, and charged forward. Raising the gun, he got as close as he could, just out of lunging range, and started firing through the gap. With all the writhing bodies, it was a bitch to try to target heads, made worse by the fight to keep hold of himself. It took more bullets than he’d’ve liked to bring a couple of them down.

He _felt_ those two go out, leaving voids in the staticky dark, felt a shifting inside his head as those empty places in the group mind filled themselves in. They knew, those others, they _understood_ , and in the instant they hesitated, Jake threw all his weight against the door, slamming it on hands that hadn’t drawn back far enough. Eliot leaped to join him; they hauled the door back the inch or two it took for those fingers to pull away, then slammed it again. This time it closed fully. Bracing himself, Eliot somehow held it as Jake looked around wildly, grabbed a stray piece of pipe, and jammed the door with it.

“That ain’t gonna hold long,” Eliot growled. Jake was bent over, panting and trembling. He grabbed Jake’s arm, dragging him away from the door—

_—fingertips digging into warm, yielding flesh—_

—then shoved the man hard, sent him stumbling on ahead. “Go, move it!” Couldn’t get close, didn’t dare touch; too dangerous. Bad enough the man’s scent was pouring off him, calling out like water to the dying. Swallowing back saliva, Eliot focused on the action of running, the impact of each stride on cement.

The man— _Jake, he had a name_ —was limping badly as they turned the corner. Too slow. “Injured?” The answer was a pained, wordless sound. Not a bite; there was no blood smell. Could be a sprain, even a break—adrenaline could carry a guy, but not forever. He’d lost his rifle somewhere, too. Damn it.

A _clang_ behind them, then another. _Frustration. Relentless intent._ A _craving_ so strong the world wavered and swam around him. He staggered, stumbling against the wall. Jake hesitated, looked back.

No good. Seconds—a minute or two if they were _lucky_ —and that mob would be out and after them. No way they could outrun it, not like this. And when the pack got into close-contact range, considering how hard the link was dragging at him already....

No. Only one way forward that he could see. He had to give Jake time to get away. From them. From _him_.

“Go,” he said, his voice thick, catching in his throat. “Go on. I’ll hold them here. Long as I can.”

Jake’s eyes were wild; tension wailed in every line of his body, every trickle of sweat. “You can’t—”

“I said, _go_!” _Frustration_ , but this was his own; _anger_ , and that made him clear. Pushed back the black fog with the absolute clarity of what _he_ wanted. He anchored himself in it, breathed, and then met Jake’s eyes, showing him level-headed certainty, and as little of the pain as he could manage.

“Protect them,” he said.

A clatter behind them, a ringing clash, and he glanced toward it instinctively. When his gaze flicked back to Jake, the other man nodded in sober respect and understanding. Without any more words, Jake turned and bolted, making his best speed away from there.

The horde was coming: a dull thunder of feet, of grunting and groans, the occasional high-pitched yowl cutting through it. Settling himself into the familiar calm before action, he took his time surveying the ground. The corridor was wide enough for two abreast: not ideal. Hard to block them from getting past him. There was a doorway between him and the warehouse area that would serve as a chokepoint, but he needed to give Jake some more time.

They were almost on him, and he raised his gun in a two-handed grip, aimed with care.

The first of them came around the corner, and he fired.

The first bullet hit a pipe a little ahead of them, punching a hole that let steam come blasting out. The second one took another pipe, closer to him, starting another jet. It wouldn’t stop them, wouldn’t even do significant damage, but they’d be blinded and disoriented as they came through, just for a moment. Might help kill the scent trail, too, though he wouldn’t count on that.

A woman blundered out of the steam, and he shot her in the face. The next one he caught in the chest—as she reeled from the impact, he kicked her backward into the next few, tangling them all up. A man half fell over her, and as he stumbled, trying to get his feet back under him, Eliot got in another head shot.

Too many coming up on him now, and he started backing to keep from being overrun, even though moving cost him some in aim. _Crack_ —miss. _Crack, crack_ —as that one went down, he went hand to hand with the man who came around the crumpling body, blocked his arm, spun him around, shot him in the back of the head as he fell. Had to jog backward to regain space, then turn and run. At least seven through the steam now; he didn’t know how many there were in all.

And they were _aware_ of him. Not angry, not afraid, but they knew he was there—he was pulling some of their focus, and their attention thickened around him, _inside_ him, sticking like spiderweb to whatever it was in him that answered to them. He forced himself through it, half turned and shot behind himself, firing wild, not in hope of hitting but to distract, maybe give some pause.

Nope. The mind didn’t care. There was only _forward, hunger_ , the awareness that food was out there; losing pieces of itself didn’t matter. He wasn’t an enemy. Not even an obstacle. He wasn’t anything.

Except—

_Separate._

A spot of dark outside the darkness.

_The same_.

Just another piece.

He’d dislocated a finger a couple of times on jobs. Popped it back without hardly thinking about it.

And now he was—

_Slid...ing_

_In...to._

_Place—_

“— _No!_ ”

He ran. Sprinted all out. Must’ve taken down the fastest ones—he got some distance from the pack.

Doorway up ahead. He was...he’d been going to....

_Protect them. Keep them safe._

He stopped in front of the door. Turned. Lifted the (... _gun_...)...pulled the...

_Click._

What.

_Click. Click._

Something was wrong. He needed to...to....

He didn’t know.

“Fuck!”

He threw the useless thing at them and took a position in front of the doorway.

Shift of weight. Finding the balance that he needed. Gathering all his limbs, settling into the easy stance of readiness.

_This_ he knew.

The first was on him, and he stepped into its advance. Hit, hit—knock back into the next one. Grab a reaching arm—twist. Shove. Break fingers—break the grip this one had on him, smash the face in. Beat down another, get an opening, hands around the head and— _snap_.

There were too many, pressing forward into him, not giving him enough room to move. Broken bones, eyes blinded with blood, nothing kept them down. They drove him back, back—he grabbed hold of the sides of the opening and held on with all his strength.

Not enough. The pressure of so many broke his grip. They pushed him back, out through the gap, and then it was just knees and elbows, fists and teeth, fighting, fighting, _fighting_ , their bodies against him, grappling, _dark stutter static closing in, no I can take you, I have to, I have to._

Several piled against him, bearing him to the floor under their weight. Others stumbled over and past. And he couldn’t get up. He couldn’t.

_This._

_This is._

_Same._

Too heavy. Too...deep. Struggle started slipping into stillness.

_Same not-one, same emptiness, same need._

_Same HUNGER._

...no. he had to...

...fight...

_H-U-N-G-E-R_

...had to...remember...

_B-U-R-N-I-N-G B-L-A-C-K B-U-R-N-I-N-G C-O-L-D_

...remember...

_F-E-E-D_

...w...h...y...

...a light. Inside his chest. Opening up like a tiny piece of sun-bright sky. Other faces, other voices, their hands upon him, warm and tender and true. Smiles and tears, arguments and embraces, fierce passion and gentlest intimacy.

So brilliant. So beautiful. So beloved.

And as the devouring void closed in on him, breaking him up, breaking him apart, he clung on to the memories: to the scent of them, the sight, the feel, the sound of her laugh, the taste of his kiss. To a need that went way beyond anything physical, down into the very deepest heart of himself.

_i love you i love you i love you_ , though he didn’t even have their names.

_i love you._

_and i’ll protect you._

_until my dying day._

With all that was left of him, he curled around that one bright spot and held on tight.

And the darkness rolled over and into him like a wave.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A reminder: This chapter also ends on a major cliffhanger, so if you hate that kind of thing, you might want to hold off until the next part is up. To make up for all this dangling, I think I'll post the last two chapters of the story on Tuesday, so we can wrap things up neatly.

Alec knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help himself—as soon as they reached the construction zone and the first sheltering mounds of the earthworks, he stopped and looked back. Nobody was running after them—not zombies, which was great, and not Eliot and Jake, which was the worst. He could still hear gunshots, but he couldn’t tell who was shooting what and where.

“Eliot?” he tried again, but the man hadn’t answered since the moment he’d left them, and that would’ve been too soon to zombie out, wouldn’t it? Eliot had to have reasons for going quiet. Didn’t he? He always had reasons for the shit he did, even if some of those reasons were _terrible_.

“ _Hey._ ” Sani’s voice cut into his thoughts, low but sharp. “C’mon, we gotta go.”

“Just, just—” wait, wait a second more, they could appear any time now—

Sani grabbed him by the upper arm, fingers digging in. “ _Move it!_ ” he snarled, and Alec shoved him back, bristling.

“Hey, man, don’t you be giving me orders.” Nobody got to growl at him like that but Eliot. Sani’s eyes narrowed, and yeah, okay, the man had a dangerous-looking stare, but Alec had been glowered at by the very best, and he was _not_ impressed. Squaring off, he put himself all up into Sani’s personal space and glared down from his not-inconsiderable height advantage.

Go on, small fry—just _try_ to move him.

The man’s eyes flicked aside, and he was going to take that as a win, before he realized that Sani had spotted something behind them. He spun around, heart twisting itself all up in mingled hope and fear, and then plummeting when he saw a single figure hurrying jerkily toward them. A distinctively not-Eliot figure.

As it got closer, it was clearly Jake. He was half hopping, half running, and Sani darted out to give him a shoulder to lean on. The two of them came stumbling back into cover, Jake barely able to keep from falling. He looked ashy and sick, his face tight with pain. “Where is he?” Alec asked. Not that he didn’t feel sympathy for the guy, but— “Where’s Eliot?”

The look Jake gave him flayed him down to the soul. “He stayed,” he panted, voice cracking. “Stayed so I could get out.”

Because _of course he did_. God _damn_ it. Alec looked back at the looming buildings, the door they’d exited through a rectangle gaping onto black emptiness. The gun shots had stopped.

“Hey,” Sani said again, still with a harsh edge, but quieter. Like he knew the thoughts in Alec’s head. “Don’t do it. You want to throw away his sacrifice like that? We’ve gotta get these two out of here. _Now._ ”

Alec shook his head, knowing better but still unable to help himself. “I can’t…we can’t just….” His voice broke on the words.

“ _Get them to the extraction point,_ ” Parker said. “I’ll _go back for him._ ”

“ _No!_ ” God, that would be _worse_. Whole orders of magnitude worse. If he lost them both…. “I’ll get them out,” he said, the words heavy. “And then…we’ll see. But if _anyone_ goes back, we go back together.”

There was a beat of silence. Then:

“ _Together,_ ” Parker echoed, soft and knowing.

“You guys are crazy,” Sani muttered.

Seriously. The man had _no_ idea.

Decision made, Alec gathered himself and all his fortitude, put on his determination face. “Let’s do the thing, people.”

And then Carisma moaned.

“ _Shit!_ ” Alec lunged for her, realizing a split second late that maybe it was a bad idea. When they’d stopped, she’d squatted down to rest, and as he crouched next to her, the sight of her pale skin and glazed eyes hit him with a jolt of primal terror. Her lips were drawn back, baring her teeth, but she didn’t turn on him and her pupils weren’t fully dilated yet, so they might still have some margin of safety. He fumbled the can of brains out of his bag. She didn’t respond to the juicy _schwock_ when he popped the lid, but her nostrils flared.

“Carisma, Carisma, you need to eat this, okay?” He waved it in front of her, and when her hands rose, slowly groping for it, he slopped some into her palm. She lifted it toward her face, and then some feeding instinct must’ve switched on because she jammed the brains into her mouth, slurping and licking at her fingers and making guttural groaning sounds. Before she’d finished, he put the can on the ground in front of her and backed away fast as she pounced on it. He looked away as she devoured the contents, just cutting quick sidelong glances at her, because the sight would’ve been gross and disturbing even if he didn’t have Peters’s extremely graphic death fresh in his mind.

She scraped the last bits out of the can, sucked them off her fingers, then slumped, her head drooping. The can fell out of her hand and rolled. Alec tensed, ready to run, as she drew in a slow breath—then crumpled forward with a wordless cry.

She didn’t stay wordless for long. “Ow, ow, ow— _ay, fuck! Chingada madre,_ it _hurts!_ ” She punched the ground a couple of times. “ _Argh!_ ”

Alec almost laughed as the tension whooshed out of him, leaving him floating on a light-headed adrenaline high. Hobbling forward, Jake bent and gave Carisma a couple of awkward pats on the shoulder. Sani kept his distance, his rifle still aimed in her general direction, but Alec didn’t blame him one bit for his caution. If there was ever a situation where paranoia was a hundred percent justified, they were in it.

“Looks like you’re still with us, huh?” Alec said, grinning.

“Bitch, shut it.” She squeezed Jake’s hand, then pushed it away as she levered herself to her feet, grimacing. “Oh my _god._ Please tell me it stops hurting like this.”

Oof. He wished he had some good news for her there. “Sorry. Yeah, I know, Eliot says it’s pretty bad. There are people out there are working on this thing, but we don’t have a lot of solutions yet.” She wrapped her arms around herself with a grunt, scowling darkly.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jake said.

They turned toward the fence, and—

“ _Freeze!_ ”

God, why was their luck so bad tonight? What was next, zombies raining down out of the sky? Raising his hands, he turned toward the two armed men coming over the top of the earth mound. A couple more came around the ends, and they were effectively surrounded. Carisma growled a little, under her breath, but there was no immediate rush toward face eating, so that was probably just her personality talking.

“Guns down, hands up!” That was for Sani, who’d twitched his rifle’s aim from one group to the other before acknowledging that the guards had well and truly gotten the drop on them, but Alec rolled his eyes and splayed his hands anyway, demonstrating that they were already up, thanks, you’re welcome. He tried to ignore the hammering beat of his heart.

When the herding started, he moved to hitch Jake’s arm over his shoulders to give the guy something to lean on; he didn’t need to be walking on that leg at all, let alone over rough ground. The guards hustled them around the dirt pile, past a couple of earth movers, and out into the compound’s well-lit central open space. Across the way, a couple of aggressively black SUVs stood aimed at the open gate, lights on and engines running. To their left was the helipad; the pilot was at the helicopter’s controls working on what looked like a preflight check.

And in front of them: the man himself. Tall and rigidly upright, like he had a spine made of fused steel, he stood with his hands clasped behind himself, gazing at them with cold, expressionless eyes as they were led to a halt in front of him. With his immaculate uniform, precisely cut salt-and-pepper hair, and slightly hollow-cheeked but still strong face, he could’ve been featured on a home page somewhere as the perfect visual example of a military leader, except he’d scare the readership away.

He was the literal opposite of personable. Like for real, those were dead eyes with no soul behind them. No wonder he was into zombies—probably felt a kinship with the undead.

Wait, scratch that. Kinship required actual human emotions.

The colonel’s gaze encompassed them as a group, like they were a unit in some kind of wargame instead of individual people. “This is your doing, isn’t it,” he said.

“Is that a rhetorical question?” Alec wondered.

“Well, it doesn’t matter.”

“No, no, it does, because if it was rhetorical then I—”

“We’ll clear out and return in a day or two with additional support,” Greene said to what looked like the leader of his guards. “In the meantime, we can use this set-up to test the subjects’ durability under outdoor desert conditions,” and wow, there went the guy talking right past his question and interjection like he hadn’t said anything at all. _Rude._

Or, more likely, Greene just didn’t see them as actual human beings worthy of his attention. Which was pretty damn terrifying, considering they all were on the business end of semi-automatic rifles being aimed by guys who worked for him. Nervous, hypervigilant guys who probably had twitchy trigger fingers. Not good. The opposite of good.

Just…don’t panic.

“ _You’ve got the cavalry incoming in ten, fifteen minutes,_ ” Dan said, low and tense. “ _Can you hold out that long?_ ”

“Hope it’s ten,” he muttered, figuring the guy wasn’t paying attention to him anyway, then raised his voice to an abrasive level, letting a mix of indignation and sarcasm give it enough force that it wouldn’t shake. “Hey, yo! What the hell, man—what kind of lame-ass plan you got going on here, huh? I mean, _zombies? Really?_ What good are zombies gonna do anyone? Or is this just your hobby, because lemme tell you, man, if so, you really gotta get better hobbies. I hear knitting is good, you know, less blood and internal organs involved.”

Hey, there it went, got a tiny frown. The man actually registered his presence that time. Greene studied him, then huffed and favored him with a tight, wintry smirk. “I don’t need to explain anything to you,” he said. “You won’t be around to see the operation go live anyway.”

“Operation? _What_ operation?” C’mon, take the hook, start talking. “This don’t look like no ‘operation’ to me. Like, two dozen zombies in a warehouse in the ass-end of nowhere? Real impressive, man. Your buddies in Washington know you’re spending all their money on,” he waved a hand at the complex, “ _this?_ ”

Greene’s eyes narrowed as he zeroed right in on the connection, proving that while he might be crazy and evil, he definitely wasn’t stupid. Also, he was being annoyingly hard to rattle. “What do you know about that?”

Alec snorted, his mouth curving in a patronizing smile. “C’mon, man, how hard do you think it is to connect all the dots? You’re not as smart or as ‘top secret’ as you think you are.”

A subtle hunch crept into the man’s shoulders as they tensed. Okay, _now_ he was starting to get a little wound up. “Why are you here?”

“Why do you _think_ we’re here?” Jake snapped. “You think you can just get away with something like this? You can just kidnap people and experiment on them, and nobody will care?”

“Nobody _does_ care,” Greene scoffed. “The American people want their borders secure, their prosperity and their way of life protected. If the cost of that is a few illegal aliens, the only ones who are going to complain are a bunch of lawyers looking for a payout and all those cranks on the internet who like to get offended about everything.”

“Uh huh, just undocumented border crossers and some inconvenient Indians, no big deal, right?” Jake bristled, fists clenched like he’d be about to start swinging if not for the guns and the fact that he could barely walk.

“So, wait, this is _actually_ some kind of border protection thing?” Alec jumped in, because it was clear that Colonel Crazy-Pants didn’t give a shit about brown not-real-Americans like them and trying to argue with him about it was going to get them exactly nowhere. “How’s that even gonna work? What, you gonna threaten people that if they don’t stay home they’ll end up being part of your secret zombie project?”

Greene looked past them, his gaze sweeping the compound like he was a king surveying his domain. “This one small site is just a beginning. Once Operation Dead Zone is complete, we’ll have a no-man’s-land running the entire length of the border, populated with the infected.”

The concept was appalling, but somehow Alec found himself caught up on the name, which was just...just.... “Operation _Dead Zone?_ Are you even listening to yourself talk? Who the heck came up with that—it’s like, like the title of a B-movie.” He couldn’t help but laugh. “Classic B-movie material, man, I’m telling you, RiffTrax’d be all over that.” Sani, who was standing partly behind him, stealth-jabbed him in the kidney, which Alec interpreted as _What the hell, shut the fuck up_ , and while Sani didn’t know anything about how they worked or what their plan was (whichever plan they were currently on, and Alec was extremely grateful that Parker had permanently shelved any and all variations on plan M), the guy did have a point. There was a limit to how much aggro he could pull before Greene decided he’d had enough of them. He had to keep the man talking. “So, what—that giant wall thing wasn’t working out for y’all?”

Greene’s face had gone pinched with anger, but his attitude turned lofty the instant Alec posed the question to him. Bad guys did always love to gloat about how smart they were. “Walls are expensive to build and maintain,” he villain-splained, “and they’re immobile, which makes them far too easy to bypass. The dead zone will require minimal fencing; the primary deterrent will be the presence of the infected. The terror factor of ‘zombies’ alone will keep most would-be crossers away. And those who do try to pass through the zone and fail will simply add to the number of infected. They’ll become a part of our defense system.”

The full evil stupidity of Greene’s plan was sinking in, and for a moment Alec just stared at him, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. Greene and his pals were a level of delusional that ranked right up there with Udall and his grand “I’ll show them all, ha, ha!” epidemic plan. Except now with bonus racism. Alec wondered if it would be morally wrong to hope the man got the poetic justice of being eaten alive by his own zombies.

Maybe even, you know, help it along a little.

He finally found his voice again. “Oh my...oh my God. Are you kidding me? Are you— _Who_ even thought this was a good idea? Seriously? _One_ breach in that fence, and you got zombies running wild in Texas.” Greene opened his mouth to scoff at him or whatever, but Alec just steamrolled right over him. “Have none of you seen _Aliens_? _Resident Evil_? _Jurassic freaking Park_? The whole _world_ has seen _Jurassic Park_. I mean, c’mon. Everybody thinks they can contain the thing, and what happens? It always, _always_ gets away from them.”

The man had the gall to actually laugh at him, for a value of laughter consisting of a constipated-sounding snort and a nasty, patronizing sneer. At _him_ , who had seen eleventy billion movies and was an undisputed expert at all the ways villainous overconfidence could righteously fuck things up. “Do you really think we haven’t made plans for all possible contingencies? Besides, these creatures are simple to manage.”

 _Creatures_ , holy shit. Alec returned a sneer of his own. “Yeah, because your guys here are doing _so well_ at keeping them under control.”

“For properly trained guards with appropriate technology and protective gear, they’ll be no trouble at all.” He waved a dismissive hand, which got him a quick side-eye from a couple of his men. “They don’t have any will of their own; their only motivation is hunger. That makes them predictable and easily herded to wherever we want them to go.” With a dry chuckle, he added, “They’re deadly to the average person, of course, which makes them a very effective obstacle. Cheaper than land mines and much easier to deploy! But ultimately they’re mindless eating machines, nothing more.”

“Fuck you sideways up the ass with a brick,” Carisma gritted out. “ _Sir._ ”

Greene looked at her, and his face went very still. He hadn’t even bothered to register her before, but now—her eyes, squinting against the light, might not be easy to make out, but there was definitely a bloodless look to her, and even if the man hadn’t personally picked her out for injection, he sure as hell could figure out that she was a “successful” experiment. Except here she was talking and giving him sass. So much for easily herded.

From Greene’s surprise, he presumably didn’t know about the brain thing. And he obviously wasn’t aware of the mind link. Both could be valuable pieces of info to dangle in an attempt to keep him on the hook, but they also brought Eliot to the forefront of Alec’s mind, and for a moment he couldn’t think past the sudden, agonizing pang of wanting to know where he was, what he was doing, if he was even himself and alive and please God about to come out of the shadows in a dramatic fists-flying rescue _any time now_. Alec just wanted his boy, and his Parker (where the heck _was_ she, anyway?), both of them safe and well, and to go _home_ , back to a sane world free of this racist chucklefuck’s terrible, idiotic plans and where nobody was trying to eat anybody.

“Perma-kill that one and put the rest of them in with the other subjects,” Greene said—and whoa, hold on, he had totally lost the plot there.

“Hey, hey, wait—” Greene had already turned and started walking away. In the background, the helicopter began a slow thup-thup-thup as its rotors began to spin up. The men in front of him adjusted their grips on their rifles.

“ _Sir!_ ” The guard leader stepped closer to Greene, his hand pressed to an earbud. It was hard to make out his words with the increasing noise of the helicopter, but Alec caught “Peters” and “virus.” Greene stiffened, then whirled and stalked back toward them. The guards faltered, looking at him with confusion.

“Hand over the virus materials,” he snapped.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alec drawled, trying to keep his shakes from showing. That had come way too close to ending badly. “I mean, me and my buddy here, we just came to bust our homies out of zombie jail, y’know?”

“Don’t play games with me,” Greene snarled. “Somebody must have hired you to break in. Who was it?” His voice rose, sharpened. “Were you and Peters working together? Was this his plan?” Raising his eyebrows, Alec folded his arms over his chest. “Or Meszaros, was it Meszaros—”

In the not-too-far distance, someone screamed, and a ripple of fear went through the guards. A couple swayed back, glancing longingly toward the cars.

Greene’s eyes darted toward the sound, then back to glower at Alec. “Never mind—we don’t have time for this now. Take him with you,” he said to the guard leader. “I’ll question him later.”

The man looked baffled and taken aback. “Sir?”

“You heard me! The virus doesn’t matter—we can harvest more infectious materials from the subjects. But I need to know who sent them. Take him! And get rid of the rest.” As he turned his back and started for the helicopter again, the guards all glanced at each other. Clearly nobody wanted to get within arms’ reach of people who either already were or might possibly be infected. Finally, the leader pointed at a couple of them, and they started slinking closer.

“Yeah, come at us, _pendejos_!” Carisma called. Reaching past Alec, she made claw hands at the guards, and they flinched. “Rawr!”

“Hey, look,” Alec added mockingly, “there goes your boss, running away and leaving you all to deal with his mess. Think he cares if you come down with zombie plague? More ‘subjects’ for his ‘dead zone.’ ” In an urgent undertone, he added, “He’s gonna get away.”

“ _No, he’s not._ ”

A machine roar cut through even the clattering ruckus of the helicopter, and with a jolt one of the earthmovers lurched to life. Accelerating to a lumbering charge, the excavator rumbled straight toward the helicopter as Alec stared in disbelief at the familiar—Eliot would say _distinctive_ —blond figure behind the controls.

“Par... _Parker_....”

“ _WAHOO!_ ” Parker was beaming, the manic, gleeful grin that accompanied such favorite activities as diving from lunatic heights and blowing shit up with extreme prejudice. After a moment’s shock, the guards began firing wildly at the moving vehicle, and she ducked as shots glanced off the frame of the cab. The pilot looked up, saw what was coming at her, and clawed at her seatbelt, wide eyed with panic. She got loose, scrambled out of the helicopter, and sprinted for safety.

Which caused Alec to visualize exactly what was going to happen when heavy rolling object encountered rapidly rotating blades, and—

“ _Run, run, run!_ ” Acting as if with a single thought, he and Carisma snatched Jake up in a two-person seat carry and hauled ass. “ _Parker, get the hell out of there!_ ” And everyone was running, trying to get as far away as possible before—

The noise was horrific. It hit like armageddon— _BANGBANGBANG_ and a grinding crunch that just wouldn’t stop and the raw, grating screech of metal chewing up metal. They half fell, half threw themselves down—nothing exploded, this wasn’t Hollywood, but pieces of metal were flying all over the place, and half a rotor blade embedded itself like a goddamn giant ninja throwing knife in the side of the low dirt mound right in front of them.

The worst of the noise and the rain of debris finally trailed off, and Alec gingerly lifted his head and looked around. Everybody else had hit the ground too, but nobody seemed to be dead or even bleeding significantly, as far as he could tell. Across the field, the battered excavator was valiantly trying to clamber over the helicopter’s mangled remains but instead was just shoving them across across the ground in jerky fits and starts. Alec scrambled shakily to his feet, giving Jake a hand up.

“Oh yeah! That was _great._ ” Parker bounced up next to them, still grinning. “They need to make one of those that goes faster, though.”

“Uh huh, yep, sure—okay, we’re leaving now, people!” They’d had their distraction; now they needed to get the hell out. Grey-faced and shaking with pain, Jake had given up all pretense of manfully standing on his own two feet, and Alec was not looking forward to getting him over the fence. But first they had to make it _to_ the fence. “Carisma, gimme a hand here.” She didn’t respond, and he glanced over. “Carisma?”

She was staring straight ahead, head cocked slightly, as if listening, but her eyes were unfocused, her expression blank, and a cold terror slithered into his stomach like that goddamn Ceti eel into Chekhov’s ear.

“Aw, _hell_ ,” Sani muttered.

Ahead, figures emerged out of the shadows of the earthworks. They paced slowly forward until they reached the edge of the open area and stopped, forming an irregular line. Men and women, one of Greene’s stray guards, even a teenaged girl, all pale and unkempt and staring at them with flat, hungry gazes. There were fourteen, maybe fifteen of them. Alec didn’t know what the critical mass was for the mind link to make them intelligent, but this sure as hell had to be plenty.

And there was one more, standing at the back of the crowd. There was blood on Eliot’s mouth, in his hair, staining his clothes, so dark that it looked black; bruises like smears of shadow on his face; and blank nothingness in his eyes.

Staring, Alec shook his head, his lips moving on speechless denials. This couldn’t be—this—

“ _Hardison._ ” Parker’s hissed warning jolted him to enough awareness that he dragged Jake back, away from Carisma, his heart pounding. Not that retreating would do any good. They couldn’t outrun the mob, not like this. There was no question that they were goners. And it was an awful, _awful_ way to go.

What made it worse, though, as impossible as it seemed that things _could_ be worse, what added heartbreak to the horror, was that it had stolen Eliot from them, enmeshed him with the others, so they couldn’t even fall together.

“ _Eliot!_ ” Parker yelled, her voice cracking, in a desperate attempt to reach him. “ _Eliot!_ ” He never so much as twitched.

And _God_ , Alec wanted to pray that Eliot, at least, would survive all this, that Eliot would get to live even if he and Parker didn’t make it out, but when—or if—Eliot ever came back to himself and realized what had happened, what he’d been a party to, what he’d lost...living wouldn’t be a kindness then.

He’d promised Eliot the gun if it ever came down to this. He wouldn’t even be able to keep that promise.

“ _Eliot!_ ” Parker’s scream splintered the night. Carisma turned her head to stare at them, unblinking.

Harsh, barking laughter broke out behind them, and Alec looked away from their imminent doom. Halfway between them and the SUVs, Greene stood, his hair mussed, his formerly immaculate uniform rumpled and sandy. His cold eyes gleamed as he smiled.

“You know what they say,” he called, wolfish and so very smug. “I don’t have to be faster than the zombies. I just have to be faster than _you_.” He gave them a mocking wave as he backed toward the vehicles.

“Son of a _bitch_ —” That asshole even got the last word in—

—and Carisma moved, quick as a cat. Parker leaped in front of Alec, taser out—

(“ _Leave me! Run!_ ” Jake was yelling, and yeah, fuck that noise.)

—as all the zombies surged into motion, charging at top speed and with single-minded intensity toward them…

…and past.

_What._

Alec could only stare, jaw dropped, wondering if he was suffering some kind of mental break, because this made no sense at all. Not that he was complaining—as the possibility that they might actually _not_ die started to sink in on him, he was barely able to keep from collapsing with mind-blowing, knee-wobbling relief. Somehow, he had no idea why, the zombies had ignored their little group completely, but Greene and his men weren’t so lucky. There was screaming and yelling and gunfire as the zombies raced up on them, and Alec cringed, his gaze flinching away, not really wanting to see the carnage that was about to happen. But as the violence began, something about it nagged at his attention, something familiar, caught out of the corner of his eye, and he dared to look back. It took a moment, but then he realized that the zombies weren’t grappling and clawing and biting.

They were _punching._

And wait, someone was missing, where was....

He glanced back, and his heart leaped—didn’t just leap, launched itself skyward in a blaze of glorious joy, right straight out of the atmosphere, leaving him breathless and jubilant.

Because Eliot was still standing there. His fists were clenched tight as his sides; his eyes were still blank and remote, but his jaw was fiercely set, his brows drawn into a frown, a beautiful, familiar frown of concentration.

“He’s controlling them,” Parker said. Her voice trembled, maybe with wonder, maybe with tears. Maybe with both. Because yeah, he kind of felt like happy crying too.

There was no question now—the zombies were _fighting_ , using precisely aimed blows, performing take-downs, all in Eliot’s quick-striking, brutally relentless style. He’d come out on top of the group mind, because _of course_ he had, and it was amazing, it was fucking amazing, it was—

Alec couldn’t contain himself anymore. “ _Sweetheart! Baby!_ Aw yeah, man— _yes_! _That’s_ my guy!” He jumped and punched the air a few times, and he might have dropped Jake just a little in the process, but hey, the guy’d be more comfortable sitting down anyway. He turned to Parker, and yeah, she’d teared up a little, but her smile illuminated his whole world. In a single shared impulse, they swept each other up into a tight hug of relief.

And here it came, _finally_ , a convoy of dark cars, SUVs, and a couple of transport vans, which, if their luck was holding, were... _yes_ , when the vehicles pulled in through the gate and stopped, the people who poured out wore FBI tactical gear. The cavalry had fucking arrived, following the breadcrumb trail of clues they’d left behind.

“You guys are late!” he yelled, grinning like a fool. “You are _so_ late, we just about cleaned up here without you. What did y’all do, stop for Taco Bell?” And maybe he shouldn’t be courting their attention like this—the original plan, before everything had fallen apart, had been for them to slip out just ahead of the law coming down, but the cops would have their hands full with Greene and his men for at least a few minutes. Plenty of time for them to disappear into the night.

Or...maybe they should stay. Because as soon as the cops started leaving their vehicles, the zombies all stopped fighting and backed away, then knelt down, hands clasped behind their heads in obvious surrender. Under Eliot’s control, they could be taken in safely—they wouldn’t have to be gunned down like monsters, they could get _help_ , maybe have a chance to live as people again, and that was fantastic, a best-case scenario right there within reach. It was worth some risk, wasn’t it? And this was Vance’s case, he knew them, and they could work something out, make a deal to get the whole Portland thing smoothed over, what with saving the world again, couldn’t they?

It was Eliot and Parker’s call, and Eliot seemed to be aiming toward that end. Alec glanced toward Parker, trying to get a read on her. She was tense, ready for flight, and he drew breath to tell her his thoughts.

That’s when the first gunshots started.

Some of the agents had stayed back and spread out into covering positions; the rest had split into small teams. As the teams advanced, they dragged Greene and his guards back from the nearest zombies and forced them to lie down on the ground, if they weren’t down already, then shot the zombies one by one, putting no less than three bullets into each one’s head.

And Alec could understand _why_ , sure—the agents didn’t know what he did—but god _damn_ , it didn’t have to be that way. “No,” he muttered, “aw, _no_ ….”

The agents were all wearing riot helmets with face shields, but Vance was easy to pick out—that giant guy directing their movements from the front, his gun held up and at the ready. “If it even _looks_ like a zombie, take it out!” he shouted.

_Carisma._

“ _No!_ ” Alec launched himself forward, vaguely aware of Parker yelling his name. Carisma was one of the ones nearest to him—he jumped in front of her just as a team of agents was turning her way. “Not a zombie!” he yelled, arms spread wide, both to cover Carisma and so they could get a good, clear look at him. “I’m not infected! Don’t shoot them—they’re not dangerous! They’re under control!”

“Get down!” the lead agent shouted back. “Get down on the ground!”

Sani slid in behind Carisma, crouching down to cover her back. He’d gotten hold of a rifle, probably from one of Greene’s downed guards, which might not have been the best idea from a don’t-make-the-nice-agents-nervous stance, even if it made Sani himself personally feel safer, but then the zombies weren’t armed, so it also made him less likely to be mistaken for one. Hopefully. “Border Patrol!” Sani called out. “She’s one of ours!” The agents hesitated; then the team leader looked around for direction as the rest kept them covered.

Yeah, _he’d_ get them some directions, all right. “Vance!” Alec shouted. “Vance, call them off!— _Vance!_ ” The man paid no attention, though, instead striding through the action, heading straight for—

“ _Eliot!_ ” Alec yelled. That wasn’t a “hey, buddy” walk—it was an “I am coming for you” walk, and could Eliot even see the danger, with his head all up in the group mind? (And what were their deaths doing to him? Damn, not a happy line of thought.) Eliot had been bothered at the end of his phone call with Vance, Alec remembered, and he hadn’t asked at the time, hadn’t pushed when Eliot brushed it off, but he should have, because he was having a bad, bad feeling about all this.

Vance was a “do what had to be done” kind of guy. And maybe Eliot being one of the infected weighed more in the balance than whatever kind of former boss, maybe friend relationship it was that they had.

“Eliot, Eliot, wake up! Snap out of it!” Still no acknowledgment—Eliot stood motionless, his gaze fixed on the distance. He didn’t even seem to register Vance at all as the man approached. “Let ’em go, man, you gotta let ’em go!” But either he couldn’t or he wouldn’t—because by containing the zombies, Eliot was still protecting Alec and Parker, as he always protected them. Alec’s blood chilled, and his stomach knotted up in fear and misery.

Vance reached Eliot and raised his gun.

“ _Eliot!_ ”


	15. Chapter 15

He heard Hardison calling him—far off, echoing from multiple directions, the words running over and into each other and blurring, but the urgent warning in them clear. Like he wasn’t aware of his own situation.

Another gunshot, and another point of consciousness went out. A blink of emptiness, a swirl in the static of their shared mind, and then that void closed, the connection filling it like water swallowing a dropped stone. Ripple and gone.

It was wrong. They shouldn’t have to die like this.

They could have been _saved_.

But there was no saving them now—Vance and his men would make sure of it. And if he let them go, gave them a chance to fight, more people might be infected before it was over. The risk was real, and the cost was too great. So he held onto the connection. He restrained them as they were executed, one by one.

And they knew. Through him, they understood what was happening and why. They didn’t protest it, didn’t argue his decision, but they were afraid, angry, grieving the lives they were losing. Fragments of thoughts and memories—all they had left of themselves, everything else eaten up by the virus—brushed by him in the dark, vanished as they died.

One resisted, clearer than the others—almost as clear as he was. Somehow he could tell it was Carisma. She got his reasoning, hated it, hated that she didn’t have a better answer, wanted to fight anyway but was just enough in control not to. He got the impression she was safe—safer than the others, at least. ( _Hardison, standing between her and the guns, dammit_.) As mind after mind and body after body fell, faster now, he cut her loose. She could make her own choices. And it would spare her the last of the deaths.

Another, then two more, and suddenly it was just him, staring into the nothingness, alone inside his head. Everything felt strange—hollow and too still. With a start, he shook it off and came back to himself, disoriented. And not alone after all. There was someone standing near him, and he looked up and to the left, straight into the barrel of Vance’s gun. His gaze flicked past it, meeting Vance’s eyes and reading the intention there.

“Sorry, Eliot,” Vance said. “Wish I didn’t have to do this.”

A split second, a heartbeat to decide whether or not to live, to lunge for the weapon, but before Eliot made the choice Vance’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly, the tension in the man’s body changing as his attention shifted. Eliot couldn’t see the new presence, hidden from him behind Vance’s body, but he smelled hot metal and gunpowder, and behind that a heart-catchingly familiar scent, anger-sharp and icy-earthy-sweet.

_Parker._

“ _Bang bang_ ,” she said, in the kittenish voice that was Parker at her most feral. Eliot watched Vance calculate his chances, and when the gun finally tipped upward in mute surrender, he stepped forward and took it out of Vance’s hands. He ejected the magazine and kicked it aside; the gun itself he’d probably contaminated, considering the blood on his hands, so he slipped it into a jacket pocket.

“You’re making a mistake,” Vance said.

“ _You’re_ the one making a mistake,” Parker snarled. Vance’s eyes cut to one side, failed to catch her in his peripheral, and snapped back to Eliot. They were steely, promising no quarter given if he managed to get the drop on them, relentless pursuit if they ran. Some of the nearer agents had noticed the standoff and were moving in fast to surround them, while others had Hardison and the two patrol agents covered. And more vehicles were rolling up to the gate. He’d seen plenty of bad odds, and these were terrible.

“If I come in,” he started, testing the waters.

“Don’t you _dare_.” Parker’s voice was a whip crack of warning, edged with held-back tears. “We’ve been over this. You’re not expendable. You are _never_ expendable. He’s not going to take you.”

He’d bargain his life for theirs, no hesitation. Trade his freedom to let them go free, and never count the cost. But Parker’s hand was on the gun, and though he couldn’t see her eyes, he could imagine their diamond-bright fierceness. If he glanced over at Hardison, he knew he’d see that same determination, less vicious but just as deep and true. They wouldn’t let him go easy, and even if he managed to argue some sense into them now, those two idiots would chase him into hell just to get him back.

God, they were dumbasses and they drove him crazy, but they were _his_ dumbasses, and he was theirs all the way, now and forever. So yeah, somehow—he had no fucking idea how—they were just going to have to figure a way out of this mess.

Together.

In spite of himself, his mouth quirked into a smile as he refocused on Vance.

“You heard the boss,” he said.

Vance sighed through his nose, his face tight with annoyance. “Are you really okay with this?” he asked. The words were aimed at Parker, though the accusation in his eyes was all for Eliot. The man knew enough about them to press him instead of Parker, to lean on his sense of duty, because Parker followed no rules, had no scruples, was a wildcard, crazy and amoral.

Well…Vance _thought_ he knew them, anyway.

“All it would take is one lapse,” Vance was saying, “one slip, one loss of control, and we could be looking at a disaster of catastrophic proportions. Thousands could die, maybe more. And I’m supposed to leave all those lives in the hands of just one person?”

“Tell him, Eliot,” Parker said, calmer now. He steadied himself on her assurance and met Vance’s challenge without faltering.

“I won’t slip. After this,” he nodded at the field of death. “I’m not afraid of losing control. If I could contain all of them, hold them back from attacking your guys, I figure I can keep myself in hand.” And he couldn’t help it—despite the grimness of the situation around them, he smiled again, helpless with love and with pride in the people who impossibly, wonderfully loved him back. “ ’Sides, it’s not just one person. It’s _three_.”

Vance glanced at the carnage and then back, his intensity softened by surprise. Apparently he was just now figuring out why his assault had gone so easily. Raising his eyebrows, Eliot waited for Vance to put things together. He fucking hoped that the man appreciated the tragedy that had happened here.

Finally, Vance huffed out a wry snort, and some of the tension left him. “So. You figure you’re all just going to walk on out of here.”

“I figure they are,” a voice called, followed by the thunk of a car door. Everyone’s attention jumped in that direction. The late-arriving vehicles parked outside the gate were a mixed bag—several pickups, a jeep, and a couple of cars, all of which he recognized, and none of which were official. Dan flashed a badge at the agents who had moved to intercept him, and when they hesitated, he sauntered past, hands thrust into his pockets, with all the casual ease of someone who belonged exactly where he was. Nobody stopped him as he came up to them.

“Who’re you?” Vance said, sharp and suspicious. Dan met his curtness with a relaxed, almost lazy smile, the kind that was both real and a mask, like all the best grifts.

“Dan Lopez. Border Patrol.”

“This isn’t your jurisdiction,” Vance said.

“Nope.” Dan nodded toward Sani and Carisma, who had been moved closer, still under guard. Eliot wasn’t sure whether the agents had herded them over or Hardison had somehow managed to shuffle the entire group in their direction. “But those are my people. That gives me an interest here.” His smile let slip a hint of challenge while still being on-the-surface friendly. “What were you planning on doing with them?” As Vance drew breath to answer, Dan added, “They were kidnapped, you know. Taken in the midst of performing their lawful duty as agents of the US government.”

Vance studied them, and especially Carisma, who returned his look with an insolent head tilt. It was pretty plain what she was, and Vance’s mouth tightened. “They’ve been exposed to a dangerous, extremely infectious disease. They need to be taken into custody and put into quarantine immediately.”

“I didn’t think disease control was in _your_ jurisdiction,” Dan said. “Do you have an order from the CDC? If not, you have no authority to detain them.”

“What are you, a lawyer?” Vance muttered under his breath, and Dan raised his eyebrows, amused.

“I don’t suppose you have a warrant for their arrest, either. Not even any proof of criminal activities?” Dan rocked back on his heels, looking thoughtful. “Hm. Well.”

“Surrender now, man,” Hardison called to Vance, grinning. “It’s just easier that way.”

“How about we have a friendly chat about all this?” Dan suggested. “No need for all these guns, right?”

A beat of hesitation, and Parker stepped away from Vance, quickly backing well out of his reach. Smart, and ideally Eliot would’ve given himself some room to maneuver too. Vance wasn’t fast, but he could take a hit or twenty, and if he ever got an arm around you, you were screwed. Trying to grapple with the man was like wrestling a bear, except a bear wouldn’t punch you in the solar plexus. It’d be a brutal fight under the best conditions, and after trying to hold back an entire horde all on his own and getting trampled by them? He was definitely not at his best.

He couldn’t be seen to retreat, though. Couldn’t show weakness or faltering. He had to be rock-solid stable and in control. All confidence. No uncertainty. No doubt in himself. When Vance glanced back at him, he returned a slow blink. _No need to fight. But I could. So let’s deal_.

It was only after Vance looked away again that he remembered the condition of his eyes, and that instead of projecting _Eliot Spencer, badass_ he might’ve been giving off _creepy nonhuman freak_. God _damn_ it.

But Vance had started calling orders to the nearby agents, directing them to back it up some and sending most of them off to help finish securing the area. He didn’t tell the guards covering Hardison, Sani, and Carisma to stand down, but that was just being sensible—he couldn’t give up all his leverage over them. Once the immediate area had been cleared, he faced off against Dan, who studied him with mild interest, seemingly unfazed by the way Vance loomed over him.

“I see where this is heading,” Vance said. He’d lowered his voice, keeping this part of things private. “You want to talk me around to letting them _all_ go. These guys too.” He jerked his head at Eliot in particular. When Dan didn’t answer at once, he growled, “And don’t try to bullshit me. You were too far away to hear what I was saying. You’re on their comms.”

“You caught me,” Dan agreed, smiling.

“Do you even know who they are?”

Dan’s gaze traveled across them. “Thieves, I think you guys said,” he mused, and Hardison gave him a flourishing little wave.

“That’s right,” Vance said. “They’re criminals—”

“Except for the part where you got all our charges cleared that one time,” Hardison put in. “You know, the last time we saved the world from an epidemic?” Vance glowered at him, and Hardison raised his hands defensively. “Hey. I’m just sayin’.”

“Yeah, and I can stick you with new charges for Portland and San Francisco,” Vance shot back. “So don’t push your luck.”

“It’s true,” Dan said, recapturing Vance’s attention. “They do break the law. But sometimes the spirit is more important than the letter.” Looking away, he surveyed the compound, his expression turning serious. “I owe them for what they’ve done for us, getting our people out. And you owe them too, Colonel. We all do, for the horrors they’ve stopped here. You want to let them go as much as I do.”

Vance’s jaw worked, but he didn’t deny it. Instead, he nodded toward Carisma. “What’re you doing to do with her?” Carisma bristled up like she was going to jump in, and Sani thumped her on the arm.

“We’ll take care of her,” Dan said. “That’s what it means, when somebody’s one of your people.”

“It’s manageable,” Eliot added, because being talked about like they were a problem to solve instead of actual human beings who were capable of handling their own shit was deeply annoying. “The virus,” he clarified when Vance blinked and glanced over at him. “She’s stable. She’s gonna be fine.”

There’d been a time when he’d considered Vance one of his people. Even after he’d turned down the man’s offer, choosing to stick with his team instead (as if there’d been a choice there, and not an already unbreakable bond that he was just affirming), there had been that tie between them. And no hard feelings toward Vance for intending to kill him—he got it, he honestly did—but if Vance couldn’t look past the disease now, couldn’t see him as the same person, as a fucking _human being_ —

Well. That connection had to run two ways.

Vance studied him, inscrutable, and he returned it with stony intensity.

Finally, Vance turned and waved the guarding agents to stand down. There was reluctance in it, but the decision counted for something, at least. The old trust might not be there, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to lower his own guard any time soon, but the door was still open, and they’d have a chance to see what the future might bring. He’d take that.

“I’m so glad we could come to an understanding.” Dan was all beaming friendliness again. “So now that that’s settled, can we get some medical attention for our boy there?” Some ways off, Jake was sitting on the ground, looking pale and strained but relieved. When they looked over at him, he smiled feebly and returned a two-fingered salute.

“It’s a pleasure doing business with a reasonable man,” Dan went on as they watched the medicos come to collect Jake and cart him off, trailed by Sani and Carisma. “I didn’t even have to pull out the blackmail material!”

Vance did a classic double take. “Bla— _what?_ ”

Dan took out his cell phone and peered closely at it as he poked at the screen. “Here we go,” he said at last, turning it toward Vance. “It’s a little small, but I think you can see it.” From where he was standing, Eliot could just make out that it was an aerial view of a bunch of swiftly moving figures, but he could tell from the context and the pattern of gunfire that it showed Vance’s men taking out the infected people, even before Vance’s voice rang through, faint but audible: “ _If it even looks like a zombie, take it out!_ ”

“Drones are great, aren’t they?” Dan said. “Come in really useful in our line of work. We got lots of other good angles though.” He tilted his head toward the gate. “Smile, Colonel.”

Outside the fence, the people who’d come with Dan were aiming their phones at the scene. A couple of them were standing up in the pick-up beds; others were spread out along the fence. Men and women of various ages, most in jeans and flannels, some smiling, some dead serious. Not all of them were obviously Native or Mexican, but that didn’t mean anything—blood didn’t always tell on the face. And all of them were paying witness to what had happened here.

Vance turned a poleaxed stare on Hardison.

“Don’t look at me, man,” Hardison laughed, his eyes sparkling with delight. “I didn’t even know about this. That’s all on him.”

“Federal agents doing execution-style killings of unarmed people who’ve already surrendered? Oh, sure, there are reasons, and probably nothing will stick, but in the meantime there’ll be investigations, lots of bad publicity, maybe someone gets thrown under the bus to appease Joe Public. You know what I mean?” Dan turned off his phone and put it away again. “Luckily, you’ve seen the error of your ways and let all the remaining innocent people go, and nothing similar will ever happen again. So this never has to appear anywhere.”

For a long moment, Vance just stood there, staring at Dan—long enough that Eliot started to wonder if he was entertaining thoughts of disappearing the border agent. (Not that he’d actually do it, but it had to be tempting.) Then his deadpan expression cracked.

“Oh my god—” With an incredulous laugh, he looked at Eliot. “What, is he on your team now?”

“Whaddaya say, man, you want in?” Hardison called out. “Excellent benefits, great job satisfaction.”

Dan chuckled. “I’m flattered, but I’ve got more than enough going on here. Speaking of which, I’d better go check up on my guys.” With a nod in Vance’s direction, he strolled off toward the emergency medical vehicle.

Vance watched him go, then turned on Eliot. “I want a regular check in from you,” he ordered.

That was reasonable, wanting to keep tabs on his state. A fair price for freedom. “Yessir.” A thought occurred to him: “You’ll burn all the bodies, right?” he asked. Vance nodded, expression grim. Good. One less way for the virus to get loose again.

“Hey.” Reaching into his jacket, Hardison pulled off the wire he was wearing and held it up. “Here you go—all the evidence you need, right from the asshole’s own mouth.” He tossed it to Vance, who barely even looked surprised. Vance nodded, then swept the three of them with a final warning look before stalking away to continue directing the cleanup.

“We did it,” Hardison murmured as soon as he was out of earshot, putting into words what they were all thinking and feeling, a tremor of disbelieving awe and relief in his voice. They weren’t safe until they were out of this place and in a secure location, and they weren’t really _done_ until they disposed of the materials, but the nightmarish part, at least, was over.

By unspoken agreement, they crossed the compound and fetched up at the rescue truck, where a paramedic was splinting Jake’s leg for transit. Carisma was standing back and hassling him in a friendly way. She glanced up as Eliot came over to her. “You doing okay?” he asked.

She grimaced. “It sucks, but eh, what’re you gonna do. Whatever doesn’t kill you, right?”

“I’ll give you the full rundown before we go,” he promised. “I’ve got some techniques that should help with the pain. Although...you actually seem to be doing all right with that.”

“It hurts like a motherfucker, but compared to the cramps I used to get in middle school?” She laughed, sharp and ironic, and flashed him an evil grin. “This ain’t nothing.”

He loved women, but god, they could be damn scary. Even though it was sexist hiring practices, sometimes he was glad that most of the heavies their marks employed were men.

At the back of the truck, Hardison was asking for a blanket, and okay, yeah, the desert got cold at night, but did he really need—and then Hardison walked up to him, shook the blanket out, and threw it over his head.

“What the _hell_ , man?” Before he could flail out from underneath it, a pair of long arms wrapped around him, Hardison holding him tight and close, protected from all the blood by the fabric. Parker’s arms came around him from the other side, and he was trapped between them, folded into a hug that lingered, drawn out long like they never wanted to let him go.

“ _Really?_ ” he muttered, even as he yielded to them, sinking into the reality that they were safe and together, even as his heart ached with the width and depth of his feelings, with how much he wanted— _needed_ —that forever with them.

Despite the fact that his current situation was absolutely _ridiculous_.

“All right, _all right_ ,” he growled at last, pushing them gently away. He threw the blanket off and shoved his gross, messy hair out of his face. He desperately needed a shower. And to burn all his clothes.

(And to check if he’d been injured, since he couldn’t tell. The bullet holes from before had healed over, leaving just slightly strange gray scars, so he was hopeful that any new wounds he might’ve gotten would do the same.)

Hardison took the blanket and rolled it up so the blood smears were on the inside. “C’mon, Casper,” he said, his smile warm and teasing. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m gonna punch you into the afterlife,” Eliot grumbled. “Besides, it’s a blanket, not a sheet.”

“So hey,” Hardison said, after they’d stepped away from the rescue vehicle, “if we’re not going back to Portland, any thoughts on where we should head to next?”

“Is it safe to go back to San Francisco?” Parker wondered. “I never did get to jump off the bridge.”

“That…that is a thing we can look into, yes.” Hardison didn’t sound very certain about the idea. Probably because it led to the possibility that he might also be jumping off the Golden Gate. But he gave her a brave smile, and his expression went all warm and melty when she beamed back at him. Then he shook it off with a start and glanced at Eliot. “Uh, Eliot?”

“Whatever, man. San Fran is fine.” He’d never spent much time there, so it was something to explore (carefully, of course, given his condition), he’d read amazing things about the food scene, and as far as he knew, there weren’t any specific-to-them threats to watch out for. Except for the law, of course, but, “I figure we can probably get Vance to get the Feds off our backs,” he said.

(Would McSweeten hold a grudge? Better add him to their watch list.)

“Cool, cool,” Hardison said. “That works.”

A happy Parker slipped off to recover the virus samples from wherever she’d stashed them before the big showdown (the gun had long ago disappeared), and Hardison had just finished texting Nate and Sophie to tell them that they could stop worrying and enjoy their damn Nile cruise already when Dan came walking over to them. “I don’t think I’ve actually thanked you yet,” he said. “That was brave work.”

“It’s what we do,” Hardison said, all noble and dignified, then hesitated and walked it back. “Usually with less running and screaming and horror and blood, though.”

“Speak for yourself,” Eliot said, just to mess with him.

“ _Anyway_ ,” Hardison went on, side-eyeing him briefly before turning back to Dan, “I’m just real glad y’all were out here as our backup. How’d you think to set all that up, anyway?”

With a wry chuckle, Dan looked at the agents spread out all over the compound.

“If there’s one thing every Indian knows,” he said, “it’s this—never put your trust in the cavalry.”


	16. Epilogue

“Dr. Tran?” Meredith glanced up from her computer as Judy knocked faintly on the half open door and then nudged it open. The receptionist looked puzzled and uncertain. “There’s a drug rep here to see you?”

That explained her confusion—reps were only supposed to come in on Tuesdays. Otherwise every day would be broken up with Big Pharma salespeople invading the office to push their companies’ products, and nobody would be able to string together enough coherent thoughts to get any actual work done. Meredith raised her eyebrows, and Judy fidgeted. “He _does_ have an appointment in the calendar,” she said, part apology, part defense. “Somebody must’ve—it wasn’t me, though.”

“Doctor?” a startlingly familiar voice said, right on the heels of Judy’s explanation, and Meredith caught her breath as a man appeared in the doorway behind Judy, who made a dithery gesture toward blocking his way. “Julian Bashir of Sisko Pharmaceuticals. So glad you could make time for me today.”

“Mr. Bashir,” she said, rising to her feet and nodding to Judy, trying not to shake from how hard her heart was pounding. “You’re aware that this is out of the ordinary, right? Next time, I expect you to follow our usual procedure.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Hardison said, smiling broadly. “I really appreciate your willingness to be flexible this once.” He stepped into the office, and as Judy retreated to her station, he closed the door softly behind himself.

“What’re you doing here?” she hissed as soon as they were safely in private.

“Aw, Dr. Tran, you ain’t happy to see me? My feelings are hurt, they really, truly are.” The teasing glint in his eye belied his so-called wounded feelings. Somehow she’d forgotten just how _annoying_ he could be.

Leaning forward on her desk, she glowered at him as he settled comfortably into the seat across from her, setting a plain black sample case down at his feet. “I thought you left town. What if somebody recognizes you? Or—what if you’re being followed?”

“Our job, remember?” His amusement softened, turning kinder. “I promise you, nobody’s tailing me. And nobody here’s ever seen me before—that’s why I came here to your private practice instead of the hospital. We’re all good—everything’s cool.”

As far as she was concerned, appearing out of the blue at her personal office was neither good nor cool. She continued to glare.

“And anyhow,” he went on, blithely indifferent, “the whole story’s just about fallen out of the news cycle already. Case closed, right? Bad guys’re caught, no new infections, the virus has been contained. The FBI’s even called off the manhunt on their ‘rogue agents.’ ” He looked smug about the last part, and she wondered if some of his computer magic had gone into making that happen. He was right, too, that the media uproar had quieted—who knew, maybe he’d even hacked the news somehow. She wouldn’t put it past him.

Deflating a little, she dropped into her chair. “So why _are_ you here?”

“Just wanted to wrap up a few things,” he assured her. “Then I’ll get out of your hair.”

Now that she was no longer vibrating from the tension of not knowing what might be about to crash through her door, she was able to take a moment to study him. He looked well and at ease, and she found herself relieved, because even though he could have been expressly designed to make her crazy—and also, not to forget, happened to be a career criminal—he did seem like a decent person. All three of them did. It had been there in their passion to help Emilia, even before they’d taken on their self-appointed mission to bring the people responsible for creating and misusing the virus to justice. From what little information had been made public, she could only imagine how dangerous it had been, the risks they must have faced. So it was good, then, to know that they’d made it through, and apparently all in one piece, going by Hardison’s attitude.

“How’s Eliot?” she asked, and Hardison lit up.

“He’s fine, he’s doing great. Symptoms all stable, and no control issues at all. He totally owns this thing.” His grin shaded into concern as he asked, “How about Emilia? How’s she doing?”

“I wish I had such good news, but—well, she’s stable too. They hope she’ll recover some more neurological function eventually, but it’s too early to know.”

Hardison nodded, sorrow dimming his expression. “Keep me posted, okay?” He slid a business card across the desk to her. It was, in fact, for “Julian Bashir”; she shook her head and sniffed, amused.

“Kenneth was really grateful for the money and plane ticket,” she said. “He’s planning to use it to move to Missoula, so he can be closer to Emilia.”

“He’s a good kid, a good brother.” Reaching into his pocket, he drew out a USB stick. “Now, on here is some information about the one survivor of Greene’s project.” She started at that—she hadn’t known there _was_ a survivor. Catching her tension, he said quickly, “She’s okay, she’s like Eliot, and she’s got a good support system to help her out. But I figured, if they need medical advice...I gave her your contact info, just in case.”

“All right. Okay.” She took the drive as he handed it to her.

“Last thing,” he said, his voice and attitude taking on a new weight of seriousness. “I know we said we were going to burn the samples, but—”

“You didn’t?” Her fingers curled on the arms of her chair. “Why not?”

“It was something Greene said, about how they could get new virus materials from the victims they had. As far as we know, all the bodies were safely disposed of, but even so...there’s Eliot, and Emilia, and Carisma. And who knows, maybe there’s other vectors out there. Maybe the thing will mutate somehow and come back. This genie ain’t going back into the bottle; we can’t make it unhappen. So...maybe someday someone’s going to have to create a vaccine or something. They’ll need samples to work from then.” He shrugged. “I don’t know, man, my knowledge of all this barely scratches the surface. I felt like we shouldn’t be the ones to take responsibility for what happens to these, and the others agreed with me. So....”

“Oh no,” she said, her throat tightening. “You _didn’t_.”

Opening the sample case, he turned it to face her. Inside there was a second, smaller case, silver metal banded with black. As her eyes locked onto it, it seemed to concentrate all the light in the room, reflecting it in an icy gleam.

“We trust you, Doc.” Hardison said gently. “Send it to the lab, keep it safe yourself, whatever you do, I’m sure it’ll be the right thing.”

She really, _really_ did not want this on her hands. But as much as it twisted up her insides with instinctive panic and denial, she could see his logic. And ultimately she couldn’t argue with it. Gingerly she nodded, and he closed the outer case, placing it on her desk with care.

“I was scared and angry,” she confessed. “ _Furious._ I just wanted the whole thing gone, wiped out. But you’re right. I should have taken the wider view. And I shouldn’t have left it all on you to deal with it.” She had no idea yet how _she_ was going to deal with it, and just having it around was going to give her nightmares. But she’d work it out.

“The data’s in there too,” Hardison said. When he smiled at her, it was kind. “Thanks, Doc. And you know what, we’re not coming back to Portland, but we won’t be that far away. You need us for whatever reason, just get in touch.”

Sitting back, she peered at him, suspicion emerging as a couple of threads came together. “Are you the reason a headhunter contacted me about a position at UC San Francisco?”

“Naw...well, I may have tweaked your LinkedIn keywords just a teeny bit.” He grinned, utterly unrepentant. “I mean, no pressure, you do whatever you want, but we certainly wouldn’t mind having our very own virus doctor in our backyard, given—you know.”

She heaved a sigh. “You’re terrible,” she said, but she couldn’t help a tiny smile. “I’ll think about it.”

She hadn’t realized there was any tension in him until he relaxed. “Appreciate it,” he said.

“So,” she said, since he was there, and it had been nagging at her since their last conversation, “what _did_ Parker mean when she said something about ‘the last time’?”

“Oh wow, man, now _that’s_ a story.” He sat forward, his enthusiasm engaged. “So, right, we was in DC on a job, and....”

* * *

It was good to be home, even if home as a place was still temporary. Eliot and Parker had wanted to check out neighborhoods on the ground before deciding where to settle in, instead of relying on the internet for intel (which, whatever, it made them happy), so they were staying in a short-term rental at the moment. Alec was looking forward to finding permanent living quarters, or as permanent at they ever got, anyway—he was dying to get everything customized and to set up all his stuff how he liked it, plus he’d promised Eliot that they’d recreate The Chair.

But home as a place was one thing. Home as people...well, that was something else.

He paid and tipped his driver, then took the stairs two at a time. As he opened the door, he walked right into an aroma of amazing seafoody goodness, and his stomach growled.

“Aw, man, you’re killing me,” he groaned as he crossed the room, which wasn’t exactly a loving greeting to his partners, but this just wasn’t fair. Parker was leaning on the kitchen island, laser focused on Eliot as he cooked—“Hey, babe,” he said, bending to kiss her cheek, then straightened up and groused at Eliot, “Why does your terrible brains food have to smell so damn good?”

“There’s no brains in this,” Eliot said. He must have read Alec’s lack of immediate response as skepticism, because he bristled. “I can eat stuff other than brains, y’know.”

Alec didn’t doubt it—he’d seen the man put away a couple of Mission-style burritos just the night before—but he’d been distracted by the sight in front of him. In addition to a bandana for his hair, Eliot was wearing disposable gloves and a surgical mask. Taking a spoon from a tray of them next to the stove, he dipped up a little of the soup, stepped back, and pulled the mask down to taste it. Seeming satisfied, he tossed the spoon into what Alec realized was an autoclave sitting on the counter.

Eliot glanced over, and his eyes crinkled as he gave Alec a just slightly wicked smile. Spooning up some more soup, he came forward and offered it across the island. When Parker tried to intercept it with her mouth, he chided, “Not you. You tried some already,” and she sank back, pouting.

Alec leaned forward to taste, and a wave of beautifully blended umami flavor rolled across his tongue. He closed his eyes to bask in it, and when he opened them, it was to meet Eliot’s gaze, dark and troubled and vulnerable in a way that he rarely let himself be, yearning with a hunger that had nothing to do with ripping, tearing flesh, and everything to do with the heart.

Eliot looked away first, licking his lips. “It’s a risk,” he said hoarsely. “But there’s risk in everything we do. And this....”

“I get it,” Alec said, resting his crossed arms on the counter. And he did. That need in Eliot to take care of his people, to protect them, feed them, heat them with his touch, let them lean into his strength—it all came down to the physical. To the body. And he’d deny himself—and them—to keep them safe. But to have that rift cutting between them, holding them apart....

Alec glanced at Parker, and she nodded.

“We’ll take that risk,” he said.

Eliot looked, if anything, more distressed. “Just, just be—”

“We’ll be careful,” Parker said.

“And we trust you,” Alec added. Reaching out, he curled his hand behind Eliot’s head, and Eliot stiffened, instinctively resisting, before he allowed Alec to pull him closer, to brush his lips against Eliot’s hair. “Always and completely,” he murmured into that softness, breathing in the familiar scent of Eliot’s shampoo. Shifting back, he smiled, letting a hint of affectionate teasing through. “Power of love, man. Didn’t I say that? Ain’t no way this thing is gonna come between us.”

Eliot gave him a lingering look, and even black and pupilless, his eyes could express so much with a flicker: relief, gratitude, a deep and abiding love, and just a hint of _Seriously, man?_ A smile crooked his mouth, and then he pivoted back to the stove. “Dinner’s in ten,” he said gruffly.

Uh huh. They had his number, and he knew it, but still—he wouldn’t be Eliot if he didn’t at least pretend to be tough and growly. Behind his back, Alec shared a grin with Parker. Slipping around the island, she pursed her fingers into half of the ASL _kiss_ sign and went _mwah!_ against Eliot’s cheek. He hunched away from it, but when he glanced at her, his smile was tender and amused.

“Get outta here,” he said. “Go and set the table for us.”

* * *

Sprawling on the couch in post-Eliot-food happiness, Parker listened to the sounds of cleanup coming from the kitchen. (Because setting the table totally meant that she didn’t have to do dishes.) There was running water, some bowl-on-bowl clattering, and then Eliot muttering, “ _Damn it._ ”

“What’s up?” Hardison asked. There was no tension in his voice, so whatever it was, it couldn’t be anything serious. Just Eliot being Eliot.

“Now I’ve got that song stuck in my head.”

“Yeah? What song’s that?”

“You know, the ‘Power of Love’ one.”

“Nah, man, I don’t know it,” Hardison said, with the hint of smugness that meant he was definitely lying. There was a beat where Eliot was probably giving him an annoyed look. “Seriously, man. I don’t—”

“Yes, you do! They played it in _Back to the Future_ , I know you’ve seen that.”

“Nope! No idea. C’mon, E, sing it for me.”

“I ain’t gonna sing it! Look it up on your phone or something.”

As she listened to them, she played with the pieces of sea glass resting in her palm, running her thumb over them, enjoying their texture, the tiny taps as they shifted against each other, like the last slow clicks of a tumbler about to sink into place. They had the sea in them, and the sky, and the going away, and the coming home.

Music had started playing over the wireless sound system, and Hardison was trying to draw Eliot into singing along with him.

“— _make a bad one good, mmm, make a wrong right_ —yeah, let me hear you, c’mon—”

They’d stolen these moments, this life, and they’d steal them again and again and again. From anyone who tried to take these precious things away, to lock them up, to chain them down.

And as Eliot finally joined in on the song, and then broke off a couple of lines later to argue with Hardison about the lyrics—

“—I don’t care what someone on the internet says they’re singing, it’s right there in the song, man, play it back—”

—her smile widened until she had to laugh out loud with the sheer delight of it: that they were here—alive, together, and free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap! The zombie apocalypse has been averted, Eliot's decided to cook for Parker and Hardison again, and they'll definitely figure out how to make sex work at some point. Happy endings for all! (Except for poor McSweeten. Sorry again, my dude.)
> 
> Thanks for coming along for this ride; I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
